We Need the National Housing Goal, So We Need a Federal Housing Agency

| Posted: May 4th, 2012

Mitt Romney suggested that Americans would be better off without a federal agency responsible for housing and urban development. I disagree, and here’s why. We still need the national housing goal, spelled out in the National Affordable Housing Act, that “every American family should be able to afford a decent home in a suitable environment.” The fact that we don’t meet this goal on any of its measures—affordable, decent, suitable, or universal—doesn’t mean that we should give up.

Having a national goal has meant many long debates about its real meaning, and we need a federal housing agency to be the ultimate authority to settle those debates. For example:

• Being able to afford housing means being able to buy other necessities after paying rent or mortgage. We need a federal housing agency because the meaning of affordability will continue to evolve, for example, as we address the joint costs of housing and transportation.
• Federal standards for a decent home have helped make houses safer and healthier and have yielded industry standards for building materials and house types (especially manufactured homes), helping build more efficient markets. Definitions and standards here are evolving for indoor air quality and energy efficiency—and we need a federal agency to broker those definitions.
• The federal goal of a suitable environment is perhaps best reflected in the Fair Housing Act, which requires that the federal government—led by HUD—actively promote racial residential integration. Here, too, debates continue. Should we define a “suitable” living environment based only on avoiding the most toxic situations, or on attaining excellent situations?
• The words “every American family” mean we need to go deep—to strive to reach everyone. Without that part of the goal, we would likely be worse off than we are now. But we’ve never had enough housing resources to meet all needs. Should we simply give up? Or should we expand our resources by looking beyond the HUD budget to what we spend on such needs as health, transportation, and homeland security?

Beyond words and definitions, we also need a federal agency that motivates and guides action. HUD’s many partners currently have either broad autonomy with little accountability or exacting accountability with too little autonomy. State and local actors need autonomy for many reasons, foremost because conditions vary so much across the country. But the flipside of such autonomy must be accountability—first for planning to meet the national housing goal, and then for moving closer to it.

Together, this means that as long as we have a national housing goal, which I hope we always will, we’ll need a national agency to help us get there. The “U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development” is as apt a name as I can think of for such an agency.

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What Mitt Romney Got Right About Housing

| Posted: May 1st, 2012

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently expressed the sentiment that social issues would be better left to state and local governments, without federal involvement. Among those issues, he included housing and urban development, even stating a preference for getting rid of HUD. While I disagree with that position, I agree that state and local governments ought to have more autonomy over their urban development programs and policies than they currently do.

Some housing programs—the Community Development Block Grant, HOME, and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit—already grant substantial discretion at the state and local levels about which investments, communities, and neighborhoods get funding. This discretion allows slow-growing places to buy, renovate, and rehabilitate established housing and allows fast-growth locations to build new housing. It also fuels a local process that, even though sometimes flawed, creates a potentially important forum for deliberating about the future of cities and neighborhoods.

But this latitude isn’t enough. Most of our housing and homelessness policies and programs are still locked into particular purposes, with separate funding streams, offices, and even agencies (HUD, USDA, Treasury, the VA, and so on), not only reducing the reach of these programs but also often conflicting with state and local priorities. Local governments clearly want more flexibility even among their HUD programs, as shown by the wild popularity among housing agencies of the Moving to Work demonstration.

Beyond this lock-in within the housing domain, the status quo makes it difficult or impossible to develop programs and deploy resources across domains. In particular, stable and affordable housing might be the ounce of prevention that avoids a pound of cure in areas ranging from health to criminal justice to education (HUD calls this “housing as a platform”). But state and local governments can’t redirect federal funds—or large streams of state and local matching funds—from education or health programs into housing, even though doing so might save costs and (more important) prevent harm. For another example consider housing and transportation, which are complementary expenses—it costs more to live in a location with many opportunities, but if you already live there, you don’t have to spend as much to get there. But states and cities can’t easily transfer transportation funds into community redevelopment, even though doing so could cut down on the need for more highway lanes or miles of transit provision in the long run.

Both examples suggest that a dollar spent on housing can meet more than a dollar’s worth of some non-housing goals. Any government has a host of goals to reach; in principle, it should be able deploy resources in ways that minimize costs and maximize benefits. So, what should the federal role really be in housing and urban development? Should there be any at all? That will be the subject of my next blog.

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Rental Affordability: Multiple Measures for a Complex Concept

| Posted: March 5th, 2012

How do metros rank on rent affordability? It depends on what you mean by rental affordability. Experts rely on the rule of thumb that renters should spend no more than 30 percent of their before-tax income on rent and utilities. Across the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, about 54 percent of renters paid more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing in 2010, according to the American Community Survey (ACS). At the extremes, over 60 percent of renters overpaid in Miami, Orlando, Riverside, and Stockton; around 46 percent did so in Harrisburg and Des Moines. This “overpayment” index gives an estimate of what current tenants actually pay.

In a recent MetroTrends commentary, my UI colleague Bob Lerman reported another standard that he calls the “rent burden,” dividing the median rent plus utilities by the median income as reported by the ACS. This yields the optimistic conclusion that families at the 12th percentile of income (about $20,000 per year) can spend 30 percent or less of their income to rent a place at the 20th percentile of rents (about $500 a month). This measure doesn’t account for the real distribution of tenants across rental units, though; some higher-income renters occupy low-cost apartments and many low-income earners live in apartments renting at median levels or higher. Lerman’s index gives a rough measure of the relative cost of a metro area’s rental housing stock.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “housing wage” offers another dimension for housing affordability: the number of work hours per week at the local or state minimum wage required to afford fair market rent (HUD’s estimate of fair rent in a local area). The Coalition lists work hours required for a range of apartment sizes and follows the 30-percent-of-income rule of thumb. In the DC suburbs, for example, it would take 159 hours of minimum-wage work per week to afford a two-bedroom place at fair market rent. Whereas the “overpayment” and “burden” measures use rents paid by current tenants, the “housing wage” measure is based on a survey of asking prices for vacant apartments. The housing wage shows the costs confronting low-wage workers looking to rent an apartment.

The interactive map below ranks the 100 largest U.S. metros on the three measures of rent burden. Mouse over a metro to see more information; use the slider on the right to switch between measures.

Source: Urban Institute analysis of 2010 NLHC and ACS data

Ranking the 100 largest metro areas on these three measures suggests that no single measure really captures all the subtlety of rental affordability. Some metros rank high on the overpayment scale (meaning many people pay more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent), but rank low on the housing wage measure (meaning low-wage workers have affordable rent options).The Washington, DC, metro area, for example, ranks 87th on overpayment, 40th on rent burden, and third on the housing wage measure. El Paso, at the other end of the spectrum, has the second lowest housing wage and the 11th highest rent burden, but ranks 61st in overpayment.

The alternatives for measuring rental affordability don’t even end here. Michael Stone’s 1993 book Shelter Poverty, for example, reported how much money would be left in a family’s budget—assuming a “basic” no-frills budget—after they paid for rent and utilities. Stone contended reasonably that rent and utilities usually rank at the top of families’ priorities list; those who forgo other needs, such as food or health care, to pay their housing costs are “shelter poor.” Many large families in 1990 were shelter poor but spent less than 30 percent of their income on housing, and many small and older families and those with higher incomes weren’t shelter poor even when they surpassed the 30 percent standard. We now also have the supplemental poverty measure, which accounts for housing cost differences. Once this measure can be computed for local areas, we’ll be closer to a more integrated view of how material want varies across the United States. But even then, we’ll wrestle with simple measures of rental affordability that tell only part of the story.

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Racial Segregation: It’s Not History

| Posted: February 1st, 2012

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s website made a triumphal proclamation this week that we have reached “the end of the segregated century.” The New York Times dutifully spread the news, leading with the headline “Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds.” The story beneath the spin, however, shows that segregation isn’t just a phenomenon to look back on regretfully during African American History Month (which begins today). Segregation lives on in far too many American cities.

In 1970, two years had elapsed since Congress enacted the end of private-sector apartheid with the Fair Housing Act; only a few years before that, President Kennedy had ordered the desegregation of public housing. Why should we wonder that segregation levels have declined since then? Shouldn’t the real story be that in the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area, Chicago, over 70 percent of African Americans would have to move to a predominantly non-black neighborhood (or the same proportion of whites would have to move to mostly non-white areas) to achieve an even racial distribution? Chicago isn’t the only metropolitan area in this position: Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis also surpass 70 on this segregation index. New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia—that is, a continuous band of urbanization stretching from just north of Washington, DC, to the middle of Connecticut with well over 25 million inhabitants—stand between 60 and 65. The heart of the northeast corridor still lives in a segregated century, as does the fringe of the Great Lakes. Even “less segregated” metropolitan areas still have levels of racial segregation far higher than the Fair Housing Act promised.

Beyond racial segregation, the Urban Institute’s own research for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies shows that concentrated poverty has spiked since 2000 and that African Americans and Latinos have borne the brunt of that increase. A quarter of African Americans in U.S. metros live in census tracts with poverty rates above 30 percent, as do about one in six Latinos. Only one out of every 25 non-Hispanic whites lives in a high-poverty tract. Startlingly, a non-poor African American is more likely to live in a high-poverty tract than a white American with a family income below poverty.

The conclusion of the Manhattan Institute report is worth repeating for its insidious misdirection: “During [the 1960s], the fight against housing segregation seemed to offer the possibility that once the races mixed more readily, all would be well....Yet we now know that eliminating segregation was not a magic bullet.” The report suggests that, having won the fight, we can now shift our attention to “closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites.”

But we haven’t won the fight against racial residential segregation and we’ve scarcely begun a serious fight against the concentrated poverty that remains the most toxic legacy of American apartheid. Racially exclusionary zoning practices persist. Public housing authorities perpetuated segregation well into the 1990s; such practices have not ended just because they are illegal. Illegal discrimination against black and Hispanic renters and owners goes on, as ample Urban Institute research has shown. And whites still seek out and are steered to predominantly white neighborhoods.

Addressing racial segregation in the nation’s most populous metropolitan areas isn’t a historic victory yet. Residential segregation continues, and discrimination and exclusionary practices still must be countered, so that someday it can honestly be American history.

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Regional Resilience Needs National Commitment

| Posted: January 3rd, 2012

For decades, urban policy wonks in the United States and Europe have focused on how cities and metropolitan areas can govern themselves to adapt, innovate, and thrive—or at least survive—in the face of challenges. The MacArthur Foundation’s research network on “building resilient regions,” of which I’m a member, offers one example. By contrasting metropolitan areas with similar challenges (industrial restructuring, immigration, foreclosure, fast growth, and economic inequality), the researchers are building evidence about how decision-makers in metropolitan areas help their regions succeed in the face of short-term shocks and long-term stresses.

But American metropolitan areas face unequal challenges, not entirely of their own making, that their decision-makers will be hard-pressed to solve on their own. Economic restructuring has hammered the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, Texas has grown rapidly, increasing its need for new infrastructure and K-20 education. National policies on energy, defense, and immigration have contributed to Texas’ rise just as surely as trade policies have strained the Great Lakes. In none of these cases have national policymakers explicitly picked metropolitan winners and losers. Even so, that’s what we live with.

Houston and Detroit suggest the magnitude of the emergent but very different challenges confronting U.S. metro areas (and by extension, the nation). Today’s kids, many of whom are immigrants and their children, will be the young workforce that replaces retiring Baby Boomers. But while Boomers are retiring all over the country, kids and young adults have been fleeing the Great Lakes states. Metro Detroit is the extreme but not only example. Compare Detroit’s age profile in 2000 and 2010 to Houston’s in the graphic.

Population By Age Group In Houston And Detroit, 2000 and 2010

Source: U.S. Census of Population & Housing, SF1, 2000 and 2010 Metro areas in-year 2008 boundaries

• About 1.4 million people aged 45 to 64 (i.e., Baby Boomers) lived in metropolitan Houston in 2010, compared with about 1.8 million people under 20.
• Detroit, by contrast, had just over 1.2 million Baby Boomers and just under 1.2 million people under 20.
• More stark still is the difference in the number of 20-somethings: 11.8 percent of Detroit’s total, 14.4 percent of Houston’s.

Detroit has offered too few prospects for young people in the past 10 years, so many have left for better opportunities. Houston, on the other hand, has attracted tens of thousands.

What would resilience look like in each case? Would it be simply bouncing back to the old normal? For fewer people to flock to Houston and more to Detroit? If so, it’s unlikely that either Houston or Detroit is going to be resilient. They’re both headed toward new situations, though perhaps unstable ones. If, on the other hand, resilience is more about protecting vulnerable people from harm and delivering benefits equitably, then maybe both regions can be resilient in the face of coming demographic and economic changes. Local and state leaders will respond creatively, assertively, and tirelessly to the challenges of educating young people in Houston, caring for those left behind in Detroit, and avoiding or repairing damage in both cities’ built and natural environments. But since these challenges are partly a consequence of policies adopted to benefit the nation, the nation also needs to maintain its commitment to these and other metro areas so that local responses really do protect the vulnerable and deliver equitable benefits.

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W(h)ither the “fringe suburb”?

| Posted: November 30th, 2011

A New York Times op-ed by Christopher Leinberger (November 25, 2011) proclaims that the end is nigh for the “fringe suburb” because Baby Boomers and Echo Boomers prefer compact walkable urban neighborhoods to car-dependent single-family subdivisions. But I can think of at least three reasons to doubt this sweeping claim.

First, the U.S. is expected to grow by another 50 million people by 2030 even if immigration stays constant at just below a million per year. These new Americans will form new households and businesses that will need space somewhere—often, places we now call “fringe suburbs.” Subdivided and endowed with infrastructure but still lightly built-on, these places will eventually prove attractive to residents and businesses in most American metro areas.

Second, 40 to 50 percent of all population growth will almost certainly be concentrated in California, Texas, and Florida. Coastal California remains expensive and more densely populated than most of the rest of the U.S., so many future Californians will find living space in the heavily foreclosed fringe suburbs of the “Inland Empire” (Riverside-San Bernardino) and Central Valley, just as they did in the 1990s and 2000s. With the Texas economy humming on high energy prices well into the foreseeable future, fringe development there will continue thanks to relaxed development regulations, low land costs, a spiderweb of rural roads, and well-oiled institutions for toll-road building. Florida will still attract retirees from the Northeast and Midwest and immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. Some will occupy today’s vacant condo towers, but many will gravitate toward single-family houses. In all three immigration magnet states, the modest suburbs and city neighborhoods of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s may experience more stress than fringe areas in the next 20 years as their housing stock and infrastructure age and their tax bases strain to keep up.

Third, the slow-growing parts of the U.S.—especially Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Upstate New York—have much higher concentrations of foreclosed and abandoned houses in their city centers than at their fringes. All these areas suffer from “sprawl without growth,” thanks to planning rules that accommodate faster growth in housing than in households—a recipe for rapid depreciation of urban and inner suburban housing stock and low prices for fairly new homes in the fringe suburbs. Most Baby Boomers in the Great Lakes states want to “age in place,” either in or close to their suburban homes. Many who do move will head not for their regions’ increasingly impoverished urban centers but for warmer clime of suburban and even exurban Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, where total tax burdens are lower than in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania and foreclosures have depressed housing prices. Baby Boomers’ houses will come onto the market in ever larger waves over the next 20 years, but buyer interest will be lower than elsewhere in the U.S. because too few Echo Boomers move to and stay in these places. The hardest-to-sell houses are likely to be older dwellings in financially strapped cities and first- and second-tier suburbs, not those at today’s fringe.

Since demographics will drive housing markets in the next 20 years (as they have for the past 100), it’s premature and probably wrong to presume that demographic trends will cause sprawl to wither. On the contrary: only continued patient policy and investment will help shift the nation more decisively away from sprawl and toward vital urban centers.

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Three Barks for Dog Parks!

| Posted: October 5th, 2011

A recent Urban Institute-National Recreation and Park Association event gave mayors, leaders from urban park districts, federal agencies, and business a safe haven to explore what the fiscal crisis is doing to urban park systems. But with a pay-for-use revolution going on and staff lay-offs staring them in the face, they are also still concerned about safe havens for urban dogs.

There’s no doubt that dog parks are getting more popular. The former mayor of St. Petersburg, FL (population 250,000, land area 60 square miles) told us that six dog parks opened under his administration, partly because they’re cheap and easy to build and partly because the dog owners show up in packs to support them. Ithaca, New York, my old stomping ground, has one large dog park located on a beautiful city-owned property near Cayuga Lake and maintained by a nonprofit—TCDOG—that worked for years to get it built and now continues to be the park’s steward and champion. Washington, DC, has nine.

Some of my dog-less friends and colleagues roll their eyes when I enthuse about dog parks. But having patronized them in Berkeley,  Ithaca, to Washington, and noting their popularity in less “crunchy” locations, I think dog parks deserve respect—and public support.

Why public dog parks? You might as well ask, Why public playgrounds and tot lots? After all, 39% of households have at least one dog, compared to just 33% with at least one kid under 18.

Dogs comfort the confined and make many people feel secure. But ownership can be hard for people who use wheelchairs or who have arthritis or live in neighborhoods that aren’t pleasant or safe for walking. Dog parks help reduce barriers.

Public dog parks also often become “third places”—spaces outside the home and the workplace where you can meet new people and old friends. But unlike coffee shops, shopping malls, and bars, you don’t have to pay to get into a public dog park. Most of their patrons can be counted on to help tidy them up and maintain social norms about acceptable behavior. And, of course, dogs need socialization, exercise, and safety at least as much as their people do.

Here’s hoping dog parks remain and grow more significant as “urban infrastructure.”

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Does this look like suburbanization to you?

| Posted: September 13th, 2011

Poverty rose in metropolitan Chicago by 1.5 percentage points between 2000 and 2007/09, fell in Los Angeles by about as much, and dropped by a half-point in New York. These small variations added up to big differences in poverty levels for a few places, Census estimates show. But are the places with poverty growth “suburbs” as most people think of them?

Chicago has long served as a reference point in urban studies. Recent reports on poverty’s growth in suburbs and small cities south of Chicago on both sides of the Illinois-Indiana border have prompted speculation that suburbanizing poverty is a national phenomenon. Exemplar or not, the city’s poverty rate increased from 19.6% to 20.7% in the early 2000s as its population decreased and the number of poor rose. Meanwhile, poverty rates in Harvey (IL) and East Chicago (IN) now exceed 30% city-wide, and Gary (IN), Chicago Heights (IL), and Hammond (IN) also have poverty rates above 20 percent. These rates are several percentage points higher than the highest in the metro area in 2000. In short, these small to medium-sized cities face huge challenges grappling with rising poverty rates, and they were strapped even before the jump. (See Scott Allard’s persuasive writing on these challenges.)

The expansive New York metropolitan area presents a more acute example of how poverty “changed places” in the 2000s. Opposite from Chicago, New York City lost poor people as its population grew, driving its poverty rate down from 21.3 to 18.5 percent. Meanwhile, a string of small to medium-sized cities in New Jersey—Passaic, Paterson, New Brunswick, Newark, and East Orange—saw their poverty rates climb above 20 percent. Perth Amboy and Union City also have poverty rates over New York City’s.

With its falling metro poverty rate, Los Angeles presents yet another picture of poverty’s shifting geography. The small to medium-sized cities and unincorporated areas in South Central LA—Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Compton, Bell, and Maywood—all have poverty rates between 20 and 25 percent, even though rates in these long-poor enclaves generally fell in the early 2000s. So did the rates of both L.A. itself and Long Beach. But the far-fringe cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, in the high desert over 60 miles from downtown L.A., both had appreciable upticks in poverty. This pattern repeated itself in the neighboring Riverside-San Bernardino metro area, where poverty rates fell in the core cities but rose in the exurban desert cities of Hesperia, Apple Valley, Victorville, and Barstow, north of the San Bernardino Mountains an hour or two from Riverside.

Calling any of these metro trends “suburbanizing poverty” is at least a little misleading. Most people wouldn’t have called a move to Gary, Hammond, Passaic, Paterson, or Newark “suburbanization” even in the 1950s—never mind today. These places have struggled with disinvestment, population flight, and neighborhood distress for decades. And LA’s rising poverty hot spots, though suburban in some respects, are really exurbs perched at the edge of the Mojave desert, without good mass transit and over an hour from the region’s major job centers.

If suburbanization means moving to opportunity, none of these three metro areas gives us as much reason for celebration as for concern.

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When Poverty Grows in the Metro, it Grows in Both Cities and Suburbs

| Posted: August 3rd, 2011

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the suburbanization of poverty. Some attribute this change to policies aimed at making low-income people more mobile, including HOPE VI and housing choice vouchers. Sometimes, the list of forces behind suburban poverty growth extends to displacement of low-income people from revitalized or gentrified central-city neighborhoods.

Like the rebound of concentrated poverty in metropolitan America since 2000, however, suburban poverty growth reflects spreading metropolitan poverty more than urban policy, housing policy, or housing demand in a few neighborhoods. A city in a metro area where poverty grew in the 2000s had less than one chance in ten of avoiding some poverty growth. That rate held regardless of city size, so being a central city or large city certainly didn’t protect jurisdictions from poverty growth. This same pattern holds in other jurisdiction types. More than nine out of ten unincorporated counties and townships, regardless of their population, also saw poverty grow if their metro area’s poverty rate was rising. Since poverty grew in 809 of the nation’s 938 metro and micropolitan areas in the 2000s, both the suburbanization and the urbanization of poverty were  facts of life throughout America in the 2000s.

Take Detroit. Most of its suburbs saw poverty growth between 2000 and 2007; only a handful of small affluent enclaves and exurbs didn’t. The City of Detroit, however, added over 50,000 poor residents in the 2000s even as its population fell by over 35,000. Poverty also grew in every other large city in the region, including Warren, Sterling Heights, and Livonia, all cities over 100,000 residents. All this occurred against a backdrop of widespread population decline—that is, the number of people in poverty grew, as the total population fell.

The biggest single increase in urban poverty in the early 2000s didn’t happen in Detroit, however, but in Houston, which added over 60,000 people in poverty between 2000 and 2007 as its metro area’s poverty rate grew by five percentage points. Considering the metro area’s huge population increase and its reputation for a vibrant economy, this growth in poverty may come as a surprise.  More recent Census estimates now show that by 2009, the number of Houston city residents in poverty had grown to nearly 460,000: almost 200,000 more people than in 2000. Galveston, meanwhile, lost poor people to evacuation in the wake of Hurricane Ike, echoing the much higher magnitude of depopulation and displacement of the poor from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But again, the other big cities in the Houston metro area—even affluent Sugar Land—have seen poverty increase in both absolute and percent terms since the decade began.

Other central cities that saw populations of the poor soar between 2000 and 2007 included Dallas, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Columbus, San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso. All have their own stories, but they differ from the one I’ll return to in a future blog: suburban poverty in America’s three largest metro areas.

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Suburbanizing poverty: Fuzzy concepts, fuzzy policy

| Posted: June 27th, 2011

Does it matter that poverty is suburbanizing? It depends what you mean by “suburb.” Like sprawl, gentrification, and pornography, city and suburb (and poverty, for that matter) are complex categories—“fuzzy concepts,” as Ann Markusen labeled sustainability and globalization. Such fuzzy concepts may be helpful starting points, but too often people fight over the labels instead of disentangling their many strands and meanings, which is a necessary step toward identifying challenges, opportunities, and responses.

Take one example: Houston. It’s a sprawling sunbelt city of 579 square miles. Chicago and New York City would fit comfortably inside those boundaries, or half of Rhode Island. Most of Houston’s neighborhoods have low residential densities, and many of its more modest districts still lack curbs and gutters. Vacant lots and other undeveloped land dot many areas. A recent  Brookings Institution report shows that city residents could commute by transit to only a third of the metro area’s jobs within 90 minutes, and 10 percent of residents in city limits would have to walk more than three-quarters of a mile from their homes to catch any bus.

Another example: Fremont, California, between San Jose and Oakland. With just over 200,000 people and about 80 square miles, it’s now more populous than Rochester, New York. It’s a city too—just not a central city. It’s mostly residential, though here too it bucks the trend; Boston Scientific, Western Digital, and Seagate all have facilities employing over 1000 residents there. Walk around its average residential neighborhood, and within 10 minutes you’re likely to pass at least twice as many houses as you would in Houston’s average residential neighborhood. Why is Fremont more a suburb than Houston?

A final example: Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of Washington, DC. This community of 71,000 residents—Maryland’s  fourth largest—has its own Metrorail station and a thriving central area with county offices, stores, multi-story housing, hotels, and one of the metro area’s best repertory cinemas. Nearby neighborhoods bear the stamp of early-1900s streetcar developers, but beyond the Washington Beltway, other Silver Spring neighborhoods trace the country’s residential development history  from the 1930s onward. Why is Silver Spring less a city than either Houston or Fremont? Mainly because it doesn’t govern itself; that responsibility is Montgomery County’s.

“Suburb” and “city,” then, have multiple dimensions: government, development pattern, transportation systems, lifestyle, attitude. Ranking Houston, Fremont, and Silver Spring on how well they protect and nurture low-income kids or other social indicators would be difficult right now.  In fact, the research challenge of suburban poverty is to think more clearly about both suburbs and poverty—so we can build better places for all kinds of people. (More on that later!)

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