Film review: "Cooked: Survival by Zip Code"

 

Cooked: Survival by Zip Code. Directed by Judith Helfand, 2020.

The documentary Cooked: Survival by Zip Code had its genesis in telling the story of a tortuous heat wave in Chicago in July 1995, in which 739 people died. Filmmaker/narrator Judith Helfand observes early that this event is "not part of our collective memory" the way that 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina are. Author Eric Klinenberg, who served as content advisor for Cooked, called the heat wave a "disaster in slow motion," which might have made it less memorable.

Judith Helfand (from pbs.,org)

For urbanists, the Chicago heat wave is recalled mainly thanks to Klinenberg's book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago, 2003), which investigated the effects of place ("zip code") on mortality in the event. Klinenberg's book is plugged by Jane Jacobs in Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004), which I had just finished rereading before I saw the film. Jacobs praises Klinenberg for pursuing the trail of evidence to make significant connections, rather than fitting the catastrophe into a convenient existing narrative. 

As Helfand spins out the story, we see the City of Chicago's improvised response, including a bunch of refrigerator trucks full of corpses that were parked outside the coroner's office for weeks until they were able to sort through all the bodies. We see Mayor Richard M. Daley at press conferences doing rather obvious blame avoidance. It took years for Klinenberg's research to clarify what a lot of people already suspected: the deaths during the heat wave were predominantly occurring in neighborhoods that were largely nonwhite and poor. It is in those neighborhoods--Englewood and North Lawndale are two examples--where large numbers of people don't have air conditioning, have their windows nailed shut to thwart home invasion, lack nearby grocery stores where they could buy ice, and lack places to gather (like public libraries or senior centers) where they might find relief during hottest part of the day. (Some police stations made themselves available, but not surprisingly there were few takers.)

Getting better in Gage Park? Pete's Fresh Market, 57th and Kedzie
(Google Earth screenshot)

Cooked draws the obvious conclusion: Those who died in that heat wave almost 30 years ago, like those who died or lost their homes in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, died of heat or some other proximate cause, but what killed them was the systemic racism and poverty. "This disaster was man made," Helfand concludes. (For the disproportionate impact of urban heat islands on poor people, see Fitzpatrick 2024 and Anderson and McMinn 2019.) Here Jacobs, following Klinenberg, makes the additional point that black neighborhoods with better urban fabric had a lot fewer deaths than North Lawndale.) 

There is some though not very much attempt to describe how racism in particular is responsible for so much death and misery: there is a brief discussion of redlining, and how that influenced blacks' ability to buy and maintain their homes; there are some pictures and memories of a vibrant business district in Englewood that no longer exists since manufacturing employment dried up; and research showing segregation (both racial and economic) has devastating lifelong effects on people consigned to the underclass. 

Concentrated poverty affects crime victimization, too
(Source: Pattillo et al. 2018)

Helfand spends too much time staging "gotcha" questions for people who provide disaster preparedness equipment and services. (The city now has its own refrigerator truck for corpses, so it no longer will have to use trucks owned by private firms!) Given the accumulated evidence, it's fair to ask why we spend so much on equipment and flood walls to reduce damage from extreme weather, but don't address the poverty and racism that are at the root of disaster mortality ("extreme social fault lines"). I just don't think it's fair to ask people who are immersed in other things. 

16th and Central Park in North Lawndale, 2022
(Google Earth screenshot)

Late in the film we meet Michelle Dauber, author of The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago, 2012), who argues that those impacted by natural disasters are seen as deserving of help, but "our history and tradition" is that the poor do not. She speculates that people with resources can imagine being impacted by a weather event, and want and expect to be protected, but they can't imagine being black or extremely poor. I would add that we know how to build flood walls and levees, and how to mitigate the effects of urban heat islands (Kingson 2024), but even expensive engineering is less complicated than solving racism. So the film shows us the irony of a lavishly-funded tornado response drill amidst the abandoned and derelict buildings of Englewood. (I make the same argument about Bike to Work Week.)

As a social scientist, I would have liked more discussion of the ways in which racism and poverty have informed and been replicated by policy choices, and how those choices have differentially affected people's life prospects. I don't remember them even mentioning the Interstate Highway System, or antiblack riots, of which Tulsa's is the best known but Chicago had one, too, two years earlier, in 1919.

Houses and shops that got bulldozed for the Dan Ryan Expressway
(my photo at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.)

The coverage in Cooked of how the heat wave played out in poor black neighborhoods is eye-opening and shocking to the conscience. There's not a lot about what needs to be done about racism and poverty, only that it needs to be done. So it's too easy for a viewer to say, well, I'm not racist, so what can I do? Many people know about slavery (which ended in 1865), and Southern Jim Crow laws, but it's less widely known how racial preference has pervaded American society since then, and even racial preferences that have ended (like in housing) have persistent effects. One of the things that keeps your humble blogger humble is that as a white person born to a middle class family in suburbs that were long closed to nonwhites, he has had opportunities that others have not had.

Undoing those advantages is not going to be easy. I think part of it is going to be to create a broader social safety net, so that social goods are not zerosum i.e. the perception that any remedial gains made by blacks are going to come at the expense of whites. Neoconservative economic policy and loose inheritance taxes have been good for a few but have created vulnerability for the many--of all races--that has constrained social justice (and made a lot of young people cynical about capitalism in general) while limiting opportunities for anyone not a "knowledge worker." Most people who oppose housing integration are worried about their property values, which comprise the larger part of their life savings.

Poverty is complex: housing matters, but so do transportation
 and connections to opportunities

If we can tamp down the widespread and mostly accurate feeling that if you fall no one is going to be there to catch you, then we can move on to undoing the effects the policies that have favored white people for years, which means... reparations. We need some intelligent, inclusive way of compensating for years of thwarted opportunities.

Short of that, and I admit these goals seem overly ambitious these days, we need to make policy with more attention to second-order consequences, specifically how it will affect poor and other vulnerable populations. The good news is the double-win of addressing poverty and racism means, not only we do right by the ideals we profess like equal justice and opportunity, but also, everyone is better off. Pete Saunders, whom I quote at every opportunity, argues on his Substack (as well as in Crain's Chicago Business) that "inequality is inefficiency," and "the industrial cities of the north have long been hamstrung economically by the most intense racial divides in the country," in part because "white Northern community leaders aggressively worked to keep the races apart."

If we can make inclusive opportunity the focus of broad public policy, we make a lot of social goals achievable. Helfand's documentary vividly shows the awful human consequences of not doing that.

SEE ALSO: 

"Map of Chicago Neighborhoods," map-of-chicago-neighborhoods.jpg (2086×3255) (ontheworldmap.com)

For the role of large retailers in concentrated poverty, see Susan Holmberg, Power Play: How Monopolies Leverage Systemic Racism to Dominate Markets, and What We Can Do to Democratize Economic Power (Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 2024). Maybe we should start by vigorously pursuing anti-trust enforcement, instead of dismantling the regulatory apparatus. In the meantime, communities are often at the mercy of megaretailers, megabanks, and megawaste disposal firms. A video presentation by Holmberg is available here.

For efforts at inclusive investing, see Lynne Richardson and Tracy Hadden Loh, "Helping Community Leaders Buy Back the Block," Brookings, 11 July 2024. "Redefine what kinds of projects are considered good when evaluating impact and return on investment. If a small project brings new and/or additional needed goods, services, and amenities to a community and performs financially to be sufficiently profitable and self-sustaining, that is good. If such a project is led or owned by a local resident or a person of color (inclusive economic development) and is not extractive (as opposed to businesses offering check cashing or furniture rental at predatory rates) and is not detrimental to residents’ life expectancy, that is even better. If such a project checks all of these boxes and is also desired by residents, that is the Holy Grail."

What can be done about homelessness?

Resting in the lee of the 4th Avenue Parking Garage

Homelessness in America has burgeoned in recent years (DeParle 2023a), with the increasing visibility of unhoused people in public spaces creating concern across the political spectrum. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 653,104 people were homeless in January 2023, up 12 percent from the previous year. Prevalence varied by state, with the highest percentages tending to be in wealthier states (Fitzpatrick 2024).

Of course, the visible homeless are not close to the whole story; for every fellow you see "rough sleeping" in a city park, there are--nine? ten? 12?--others sleeping in their vehicles, staying with a succession of amenable friends, or in some other unstable arrangement. Nonetheless, it's their very visibility, and the fear of social disorder their presence creates, that is forcing cities to address the broader problem.

Homelessness is a wicked problem, with multiple tangled causes that are complicated to address. For starters, the whole housing market is a mess, as documented by Jenny Schuetz (Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems [Brookings Institution, 2022]), Shane Phillips (The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach and Keeping It There [Island, 2020]), and others. There isn't enough housing of any type or at any price point, except maybe the top end; housing is being built in low-demand areas rather where it would provide the most public benefit; and prices were rising even before the coronavirus pandemic upended supply chains. Both localities and existing residents have disincentives to address these (cf. Schuetz 2022 chs 6-7), and federal housing programs support fewer people than they did 20 years ago (DeParle 2023b). Some good news this week, though, where a Pew study finds some positive impact of Minneapolis's zoning reforms (Liang, Staveski and Horowitz 2024).

Nearly everyone is affected by this situation to some degree, but it stands to reason that the poorest and most vulnerable would suffer the most, and are either extremely cost-burdened or out of housing altogether. "The biggest driver of these numbers is the lack of affordable housing," says Ann Oliva of the National Alliance to End Homelessness (DeParle 2023a).

At the same time, substance addiction, immigration, and mental health are all at crisis levels. We seem to have turned the corner on opioid overprescription, but there remain all the people whose lives were ruined and struggle to receive treatment. Surges in immigration from Central and South America before and after the pandemic have been met with policy ranging from helplessness to hostility, and they too have been flung about the country and into the housing mess. ("This is partly a manufactured problem," Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania told The New York Times (DeParle 2023a)). It is widely acknowledged that, despite recent efforts, American mental health care does not approach covering all those who need it, particularly at the lowest income levels (cf. Wachino 2023).

Unaffordable housing, untreated substance addiction, untreated mental illness, and a broken immigration system all point to more people without housing. People with unstable lives are more prone to unemployment and health issues, which can contribute to being chronically homeless. Rising numbers have overwhelmed local services, with most people noticing when they appear in places like (in Cedar Rapids) Greene Square and the Cedar Rapids Public Library. Concern is sufficiently widespread that the issue found its way into the Downtown Vision and Action Plan approved last month. As part of the strategy to make downtown "safe and welcoming," initiative 2.2.2 proposed effectively ending homelessness with establishment of a Local Oversight Board and staff person to monitor performance on a community-wide basis, ensuring efficient and effective use of resources and continued collaboration with social service providers.

Ending homelessness is a laudable goal, but policy experience is sobering. Even cities credited with substantial success in reducing homelessness, like Houston and Minneapolis, got moderate rewards for strenuous efforts. Houston adopted a Housing First policy in 2011, and has seen a 63 percent reduction in homelessness since then, with 90 percent of the clients they housed remaining in permanent housing (McLean 2023). Along with placement in "safe, stable housing," clients are offered counseling services like substance abuse reduction and employment. Minneapolis, using a housing-first approach called Built for Zero, focused on housing the longest-term homeless and saw an 80 percent reduction since 2017 (Ionescu 2023, Holder 2023). Atlanta and Denver also saw significant decreases with a housing-first approach. But all this takes resources, and even in Houston available housing and willing landlords can be difficult to find. 

And substantial numbers of people remain unhoused. "People sometimes think we're Shangri-La and we have no homelessness," Houston task force leader Mark Eichenbaum told Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. "No, we still have homelessness" (Kristof 2023). There surely is further concern among policy makers about effective local policy attracting greater numbers of transient people. 

Ending local homelessness can also mean using punitive policies to push the unhoused out of town. Some towns have wrecked encampments, as Cedar Rapids did in December 2022, or made public benches impossible to lie on ("hostile architecture"). A Missouri law--written by the Texas-based Cicero Institute, so expect it in Iowa soon--forbids sleeping on public land, with stringent penalties for municipalities that allow it, while slashing state funding for housing. Former President Donald J. Trump wants to force the homeless into urban camps (DeParle 2023b, Swanson 2023). These policies try to ensure that no one deemed unworthy receives a dime of public benefits, the same motivation for states like Iowa that are rejecting federally-funded summer meals for poor children.

Homelessness is a problem, one no one should have to live with. But we have a choice, whether to treat the unhoused as fellow human beings or as "vermin"--to use one of Trump's favorite words--or as political pawns. How we respond to homeless people says a lot about how we view our own place in the common life. 

In the nearer term, what should be done about the burgeoning "skid row" in and around Greene Square? It may already being done, which is a story for another day. I refer the impatient to chapter 5 (on parks) in Jane Jacobs's brilliant and timeless The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library, [1961] 2012). If you want more, check chapter 14 on border vacuums.

FORTHCOMING: Charles Marohn Jr and Daniel Herriges, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis (Wiley, 2024)

OLDER POSTS:

"What We Can Do About Housing," 18 March 2022

"Housing Policy," 1 July 2021

Housing Policy

More like this? Rooming houses in the MedQuarter district

The Cedar Rapids Gazette headline Sunday ("41K in Iowa Fear Eviction as Moratorium Nears Its End") is overblown, but the reality is scary enough. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Housing Pulse Survey, about 11000 Iowans say they're very likely to be evicted from rental housing in the next two months, 21000 say they're somewhat likely to be evicted, and 9000 say they're somewhat likely to be foreclosed on property they own. Even 11000 is a lot of homeless people, relative to available housing stock in our state. Similar results are posted for other states. How about 1.2 million for a national figure? All told about 7 million renters owe accumulated back rent that has been estimated in a range of $11-53 million, according to Mary Cunningham of the Urban Institute (Urban Institute 2021, slides 16 & 19).

Despite a surge in construction both of single-family and multi-family dwellings in the last couple of years, the United States remains about 3.8 million units short of where it needs to be, and existing housing has accumulated $45 billion worth of needed repairs, according to the annual report just published by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (Sisson 2021). Rapidly rising home prices (Nicholson, Merrill, and Sam 2021) have helped existing owners while creating obstacles for first-time homebuyers and renters; other issues include racial and generational inequities and lack of housing near jobs.

The Census Bureau and Harvard Center reports testify to the persistence of housing issues in America, as well as to their complexity. Those challenges can be sorted into three or four buckets: affordability (supply of housing at the right price points); connections to jobs and the larger city, and the avoidance of concentrations of poverty; and stability amidst threats of job loss or displacement through gentrification. The physical condition of existing housing might be a fourth set of issues.

1. Affordability/Supply

Nationally, the home price-to-median income ratio is rising; currently it's 4.4, though that contains a wide range of differences. San Jose, California, leads the country with a ratio of 10.9, and cities like that face a different set of problems than cities like Cedar Rapids, where it's about 3 metro-wide, or Iowa City where it's about 4 (Hermann 2018). Everywhere the market for for-sale homes is "red hot," said Daniel T. McCue of Harvard at the report's June 16 rollout, with demand overwhelming supply as millennials enter the market, resulting in higher real prices than any time this century. 

Rental prices are also up nationwide as well, with well over half of those making less than $50,000 a year paying more than a third of their income on rent, meaning they're one setback away from eviction. Rental vacancies have increased in high-rent urban areas, though that seems to have peaked. Sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted [Crown, 2016] showed a chart at a Bipartisan Policy Council webinar showing that median rents have doubled in the last twenty years while incomes are steady: 

I can't get this chart out of my head...

In locations like Cedar Rapids, discussions of housing affordability focus on people at the low end of the pay scale, those with disabilities, and those with criminal records. A 2017 forum noted federal funding Section 8 vouchers don't come close to covering all those eligible, local resources for those experiencing homelessness are limited, and non-profits like Habitat for Humanity have limited production capacity. Those landlords who do accept Section 8 vouchers are subject to extra mandates and inspections, and might could use funding to help them with repairs and updates. Beyond this, there might still be different kinds of issues higher on the income scale; unlike in San Jose, teachers and firefighters in Cedar Rapids can afford homes, but do they face different financial issues once they've bought them?

Urbanists have long advocated making accessory dwelling units (sometimes called "coach houses" or "granny flats") legal; Chicago enacted a three-year trial run this year with impressive response so far. Narrower streets would allow more land to be put to productive use (Merrefield 2021)--among many other benefits. Cambridge, Massachusetts passed an Affordable Housing Overlay ordinance in 2020 that loosened zoning restrictions on construction citywide (Gibbs 2021).

Shane Phillips argues increasing supply while maintaining affordability and stability requires some form of government intervention in the housing market:

A well-regulated private housing market can serve a large portion of our population, and tenant protections paired with rental housing preservation can assist even more. But there will always be people who are left behind by these efforts—sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Acting through the collective will of our local, state, and federal governments, we have a responsibility to provide support to those who need it and to live up to our professed belief that housing is a human right. This may take the form of rental assistance, publicly subsidized housing construction and acquisition, and a host of other programs (2020: 33).

Awareness of policy consequences is important: Cities can avoid San Francisco's infamous tenant protections that are blamed for constraining supply, but prices--and displacement--have also risen in less restrictive cities like in Texas and Washington even though housing supply has increased (Phillips 2020: 24-28).

Anthony Simpkins of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago told an Urban Institute panel that rental housing won't close the racial wealth gap, but homeownership policies will.

Affordable rental housing does not generate generational wealth. It's never going to close the racial wealth gap.... Today, in a high-cost city like the City of Chicago, a homeowner can pay less for their mortgage than they pay for rent. But when you look at the rules and regulations [related to affordable housing policy], they all skew towards supporting rental housing. There's very little room and very little ability to use these resources to build and expand homeownership among people of color.... It's all about access to capital (Urban Institute 2021, at about 59:48)]

2. Connection

A great deal of the new construction is in the suburbs and in non-metro areas, where it's easier to develop by the batch, and where zoning favors single family homes. You can also get more home for the money, although the savings can get eaten up by transportation costs; in metropolitan Chicago, for example, the closer a median-income household is to the city center, the less their total housing-plus-transportation costs. (See also the interactive maps at the Center for Neighborhood Technology website, including total driving costs by location, housing + transportation affordability index, and access to jobs by transit.) 

Apartments in the former Monroe School rent for $695 a month,
but the Walk Score is 34

Residential concentrations of poverty are problematic for children, who do less well in life than those raised in more socioeconomically mixed areas (Chetty, Hendren and Katz 2016). They are problematic for adults, who have less access to economic opportunity as well as lower life expectancy (Ludwig 2014). Distance from affordable housing to jobs creates the transportation nightmares particularly for the poor and near-poor that Steven Higashide (2019: 92) calls "mobility redlining." 

Simpkins talked about "building communities that have been left behind" as an essential part of remedying the racial wealth gap (Urban Institute 2021, at about 1:01:50). Most areas of concentrated poverty have not gentrified since the 1970s, but in fact have gotten worse off (Cortright et al. 2014). Can cities provide incentives to locate jobs that pay well near low-income areas, and discourage large corporate campuses in remote locations? Or to encourage developers to build affordable housing near areas of economic growth? 

Options for cities include zoning reform that allows a greater variety of housing in a given area (Cortright 2017); Inglewood, California is planning zoning changes to allow more housing and commercial space near Metro rail stops (Sharp 2021). (See this post from 2017 for more on these issues.)

This four-plex is four blocks from my house.

So is this two-plex. If they were even closer, would I be less wealthy?

Cities can reform zoning codes to allow the production of small fourplex apartment buildings ("missing middle" housing) in residential neighborhoods (Holeywell 2016, McGlinchy 2017). Access to capital can provide "ladders" for those with very low income, as well as attracting middle class people to disinvested neighborhoods (Simpkins, in Urban Institute 2021). The national government can revisit the mortgage interest income tax deduction (Quednau 2017), as its value for most filers was eliminated by the 2017 tax act. 

Local transit connections can be improved almost everywhere, and certainly could be in my city. Dharna Noor (2021) points out "investing in public transit isn't just a good idea for the climate and commute times. It's also a good way to ensure everyone has access to opportunity, including the opportunity to relax. Imagine if access to parks and lakes weren't limited to those who can afford to buy, maintain, and park their cars. That could go far in improving access for exploited, poor communities who are disproportionately harmed by highway pollution." 

But is a ridership model compatible with where Cedar Rapids is currently building affordable housing (Pioneer Avenue, Johnson Avenue, Blairs Ferry Road, e.g.)? I would think not.

3. Stability and Gentrification

As land values rise, and incomes do not, evictions have soared: Desmond cited a figure of seven evictions per minute nationally in 2016 (Bipartisan Policy Council 2021). Annually there are more than a million more evictions than there had been foreclosures at the height of the housing crisis, with many associated bad effects on individual lives. Black [and Latinx] renters have about twice as high a rate of evictions as white renters. Evicted renters bounce from place to place because (quoting Desmond) they "are already living at the bottom of the market, in places they can't afford."

Stagnant incomes are one cause of housing instability; another is gentrification. Gentrification occurs where some circumstance has changed raising the potential value of housing far above its actual price (known as a "rent gap"). Recently middle-class demand for urban living has risen as amenities have improved, crime has decreased, and frankly fashions have changed. Gentrification can be good for places, and the people that live in them; at best it improves economic opportunity, public services and facilities, and the tax base. At worst it raises costs for those who stay, and drives others to less connected and less-well-off places (Florida 2015b; see this post from 2016 for a more detailed review of the debate). (For an argument that a focus on gentrification misidentifies the cause of problems with affordability and stability, see McMillan 2021.)

As rents go up, or property taxes rise on homes, some residents are forced to move to more affordable areas. Shane Phillips recounts one California experience: "A $5 billion stadium was proposed in Inglewood and rents and home values skyrocketed nearly overnight; even if the city had allowed for infinite development to meet the growing demand, thousands of households would be displaced before relief ever arrived. These changes were entirely outside the control of local residents, and yet they were the ones to suffer the consequences" (2020: 13). 

Alexander Garvin's book about downtown areas discusses the displacement of people along the way to prosperity: "Increasing demand led to increasing rents and the inevitable gentrification. The rental tenants, who had pioneered loft living and could not afford to remain in the area, were replaced by occupants who demanded and received better fixtures and services for their higher rents. But condominium occupants either remained in a much-improved neighborhood or profited from selling their residences at the appreciated value" (2019: 37). Increasing housing supply might mitigate gentrification "if the citywide housing supply is increasing faster than population growth" (2019: 159), but resurgent value of districts like Cincinnati's Over the Rhine seems to depend to a frustrating extent on getting rid of the "undesirable people" (2019: 134). Either way, as places gentrify, their former residents are going somewhere, and where they go should not be a matter of indifference to policy makers.

Rising values create incentives for property owners like MidCity Financial Corporation in Maryland to convert low-income housing developments into mixed-income mixed-use (Milloy 2021). At the Harvard report rollout, Gary Anthony of the National League of Cities argued that construction of one- and two-bedroom apartments is not an answer for families who have been priced out of their single-family homes, and advocated for "race-specific anti-displacement policy."

Cities could improve access to transportation and other amenities more broadly, to reduce the value premium on accessible places (Florida 2015a). Washington, D.C. is redeveloping a closed hospital in the Congress Heights neighborhood with affordable housing as well as an entertainment facility anticipated to create jobs (Steuteville 2021). Other options include inclusionary zoning requiring developers to include below-market-rate housing (S. Williams et al. 2016, Kaplan 2014); improving housing choices by loosening zoning restrictions in order to provide more options like living above your shop (Marohn 2015); limiting increases on property taxes (T. Williams 2014); and mitigating culture clashes by facilitating communication between the recently-arrived and long-term residents (Saunders 2016).

Conclusion

Shane Phillips argues for balancing the many interests involved in housing policy: 

We must design pro-housing policies that target development where it will benefit the most people (such as where housing costs are highest or job concentration is greatest) and that discourage it where it may do the most harm (such as on sites where dense concentrations of renters already live, especially in lower-income communities and communities of color). 

We must design pro-tenant policies that protect renters living in affordable homes while ensuring that development remains a profitable venture on sites where tenants aren’t threatened and it can do the most good. 

We must increase spending on rental assistance and affordable housing construction, and complementary zoning reforms and renter protections must be in place to make sure those funds are spent effectively (2020:42-43).

But he makes an exception to all that balancing by prioritizing affordability, even though, for many current owners, increased supply threatens the value of their property. It is an inescapable fact that home equity represents the major if not the only source of retirement savings. "Owning a home is integral to financial security for most families in the United States, and rising home values continue to give the government cover for skimping on retirement programs such as Social Security and pensions," but "ever-growing property values are completely incompatible with long-term housing affordability" (2020: 61). So, at the fundamental level, focus on broad affordability and the many social and quality-of-life benefits that would bring, and figure out some other way for people to accrue wealth.

In the 19th century, Jacob Riis depicted squalid housing conditions in New York City.
An exhibit of his photographs is now at the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library
in Cedar Rapids.

SEE ALSO

Bipartisan Policy Council, "Eviction Prevention Now and After COVID-19" [webinar], 23 June 2021 #harvardhousingreport

Alexander Garvin, The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island, 2019)

Annie Gowen, "She Wanted to Stay. Her Landlord Wanted Her Out," Washington Post, 28 June 2021

Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (Island, 2019)

Norman Van Eeden Petersman, "Could You Move in Next Door?" Strong Towns, 23 June 2021

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (And Keeping It There) (Island, 2020)

Prevention Institute, "Healthy Development Without Displacement: Realizing the Vision of Healthy Communities for All," July 2017

Urban Institute, "Stable Housing is a Critical First Step Toward Racial Equity" [webinar], 29 June 2021 #liveaturban

Cities in the 2020s

Source: istockphoto.com

These are the days of miracle and wonder--PAUL SIMON

This week, National Public Radio's "Marketplace Morning Report" discussed economic forecasts by the Oxford Economic Group which expects weak global economic growth in the near future, including the U.S. (Safo 2019). Actual results may vary, of course, and the authors suggest the cities best situated for a prosperous early 2020s are those outstanding on dimensions of economic mix, cost of living, and quality of life. So the U.S. urban economy expected to grow the most in 2020-21 is... San Francisco??

I'm not questioning the report's methodology, rather taking it as read, because [a] it's proprietary, and [b] I'm cheap. But San Francisco's cost of living is infamously high, particularly housing. Its cost of living ranked #2 among U.S. cities in 2019 by Kiplinger, trailing only the Borough of Manhattan (which is only part of a city), thanks to "years of relentless growth driven by high-paid tech workers." Average apartment rent: $3821 a month. So, given their criteria, however is San Francisco #1?

Poster, City Lights Bookstore, July 2014

Put another way, if San Francisco is in the best position in spite of its ridiculously high housing costs, what does that say about the rest of the country? For example, what is going to happen in Chicago, which ranks at the bottom of Oxford's list, thanks to the frightening budget and tax picture in the State of Illinois? What about small cities and rural areas, which can't compete with the big places for economic mix (or, arguably, for quality of life)?

The "winner-take-all" nature of the post-industrial economy applies not only to individuals but also to places (though see Sawhill 2019 for the argument that this situation results from political choices as well as economic fundamentals). In the modern tech economy, wrote Emily Badger (cited below) in The New York Times around the time Amazon made its HQ2 announcement, cities that already have wealth, opportunity, highly educated workers and high salaries will just keep attracting more of them.... A small number of rich and internationally connected cities keep increasing their economic advantages--and as a result, the inequality widens between them and everywhere else.

It looks like the 2020s will feature a big shakeout. I hope it won't hurt, but it probably will. Interestingly, Brookings scholars' list of the biggest economic stories of the 2010s focus less on places than on individuals (tax cuts for the rich, rising inequality, lower life expectancy, fewer teens in the workforce) and systems (monetary policy stuck on full-blast, good news on health care access and cost, no worker productivity gains, aging population). But it's fair to say that the fall-out from most of these individual- and system-level trends will impact localities, too, and not all localities to the same degree. Localities will have, already have, fewer resources to address either rising individual vulnerabilities or cutthroat economic competition.

Maybe the 2020s will be the placid sort of decade in which these sorts of issues can be thoughtfully sorted out. The 2010s certainly were, when you compare them to its immediate predecessor which featured a small recession, a massive terrorist attack, a debilitating war, and finally the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The 2010s have been quite a breather, comparatively, apart from a series of unforced errors. Future generations may well wonder why we squandered this opportunity in government shutdowns, highway construction, and the odoriferous politics of Donald Trump. The tasks of the 2020s will be hard enough without the possibility of additional pressure from:

• an economic downturn
• employment issues for the rest (of workers, of places)
• natural disasters exacerbated by climate change
• increasing refugee flows
• increasing homelessness, due to rising incidence of mental illness and/or poverty (see Hu 2019)
• changes in energy prices and supply
• intensified inter-group hostility
• crumbling infrastructure on which maintenance has been deferred too long

Pete Saunders, a planner and blogger from the industrial Midwest, anticipates the decade to come might fulfill the transition period underway throughout the 2010s, turning away from the auto-centric era that ran from World War II until the last decade's housing crisis.

Our development future will be even more urban.  It will be based more on the mobility options and opportunities --autonomous and alternatively fueled vehicles -- that will expand this century.  It will be more economically unequal in America, as America's economy becomes more equal with the rest of the world.   And our development patterns will be something that will adapt to the demands put on it by climate change. [For the next twenty years:] The rebirth of cities actually does take hold nationally, as growth filters downward from our superstar coastal cities to other cities.  Interior cities will tout their assets and amenities and become cheaper alternatives to the coasts. (Saunders 2019)

This fulfillment will be facilitated if millennials stay in cities, as seems to be happening where such opportunities exist (Lewyn 2019), rather than coming to expect the same subsidized suburban development their parents came to expect. It will require the masters of capital to notice all the talent in the cost-efficient interior of the country, and to move to take advantage of it, and for interior cities to position themselves for strength--culturally as well as physically and financially. It will require a willingness to adapt to climate change, even if we have to call it something else to soothe the deniers.

Some days my town seems to be about attracting entrepreneurs and removing obstacles to traditional development, and some days its long-term plan seems to consist of subdivisions and strip malls, not to mention the casino. I guess the glass is never entirely full, nor is it entirely empty, and that history progresses incrementally, even imperceptibly. Whatever this new decade brings, may there always be voices of hope and visions of common life.

SOURCES:
 Emily Badger, "The Same Cities Keep Attracting Tech. Why?" New York Times, 8 November 2018, B1, B2
 Winnie Hu, "Please, Don't Have a Seat," New York Times, 8 November 2019, A22
 Michael Lewyn, "Are Cities Really Losing Millennials?" Planetizen, 23 December 2019
 Nova Safo, "Economic Growth for U.S. Cities Will Depend on Mix of Industries," Marketplace, 23 December 2019
 Pete Saunders, "Revisiting the 'Big Theory' on American Urban Development," Corner Side Yard, 23 December 2019

SEE ALSO: "What Defined the Decade Since CityLab Launched," CityLab, 30 December 2019
EARLIER POSTS:
"Globalization's Challenge to Cities," 25 June 2016
"Can Cities Change Their Luck?" 20 June 2016
"Two Tales of Cities," 7 June 2016

What future for Cedar Rapids

Downtown Cedar Rapids, spring 2017

As Cedar Rapids prepares to elect a new mayor next month we should be encouraged by the optimism of Aaron Horn, the new chief operating officer of the startup cooperative NewBoCo:

There's this high-level desire to see [startup growth] happen here, and if you don't have people trying to make that happen here, it just won't.... I just had this idea that why would I run off to Chicago or Silicon Valley to be part of startup activity when people were trying to do that here (Patane 2017).

Cedar Rapids seems to be out-performing its peer cities in the 2010s. We're three weeks away from a city council election, including eight candidates vying for an open mayoral slot. It's been a rather bloodless campaign so far, with no burning issue or group conflict to polarize the electorate. There's been a lot of talk about fixing streets and filling potholes, which speaks to a certain confidence in our future. Or maybe it's a lack of concern? We are so sure we're not Steubenville, Ohio, and are never going to be, that our concerns can be potholes vs. bike lanes or which neighborhoods are getting shorted on city spending.

Do we know why we're in the position we're in? To be sure, we were early on the tech train (Rockwell Collins, McLeod USA) at least for this part of the country, our economy has diversified from the agricultural days, and we're reasonably close to the University of Iowa--though that's in Iowa City, a separate metro with a remarkably similar income pattern. We've been blessed with some visionary leaders--a group Horn seems fixing to join--and a moderate, tolerant political culture. We're doing a lot of the right things: re-examining our zoning code, re-developing downtown, flood protection, building sidewalks and trails, re-converting our one-way streets. It would be interesting to re-run the last decade without the flood, and see whether we'd be better or worse off today, but alas, this is not experimental science we're doing.

Nationally, it is widely known that generally favorable economic data since 2010 mask a wide variety of experiences. In an early crack at the data, I showed in June 2016 just with population data that the back-to-the-city movement affected the central cities in the largest metropolitan areas differently, from dramatic growth (Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh) to steep declines (Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans).

More studies have dug deeper into the data. A Brookings Institution study, based on analysis of Census Bureau data, analyzes changes in inflation-adjusted median household incomes in 300 metropolitan areas (Berube 2017). They divide the metros into five groups:

1. booming (25), including large tech hubs and small cities around oil and gas finds;
2. stabilized (37), tech and other large cities that have been able to sustain gains through tough times;
3. recovering (73) i.e. from de-industrialization or the housing crash;
4. struggling (86), mostly middle-sized cities which had relied on manufacturing;
5. hardest-hit (76), mostly older manufacturing cities.

Spread out that way, the urban renaissance appears so far to be concentrated in relatively few places, with more trying to keep up and still more genuinely floundering. (That's sort of my impression of today's economy at the individual level as well.)

A New York Times business column (Porter 2017) highlights a study by Mark Muro, also of the Brookings Institution, noting that cities the size of Cedar Rapids are on the whole doing less well than large cities. The key graphic from the article:

Where Disruption Has Hit U.S. Workers Hardest

Automation and foreign trade have buffeted the nation’s labor force, especially across the Midwest and Southeast. But big metropolitan areas have been more successful than smaller places at recovering from economic shocks.

Rates of recovery from recession

in the 10 states of greatest disruption

How states rank in being disrupted

by foreign trade and automation*

Large

metro

areas

Small

metro

areas

CHANGE FROM

2009 TO 2015, BY

SIZE OF METRO AREA

LEAST

MOST

Top 10

cities

MOST

Michigan

PRIVATE

EMPLOYMENT

+2.1%

+1.9

+1.0

Compound annual

growth rate

REAL PERSONAL

INCOME

+1.9%

+1.9

+1.3

Compound annual

growth rate

LABOR FORCE

PARTICIPATION RATE

–0.6

–0.8

–1.5

LEAST

Percentage-point

change

Hawaii

*Disruption caused by foreign trade and automation is measured by the reliance on Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program to help workers displaced by overseas competition, between 1994 and 2014, and by the ratio of robots in operation to workers in 2015.

By The New York Times | Brookings Institution analysis of data from Moody’s Analytics, Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics

"Small metro areas" are here defined as those with populations between 80,000 and 250,000. Analysts suggest these areas lacked the critical mass to respond nimbly to changes in the economy. The Times writer quotes Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti:

The thickness of a labor market is crucial in the innovation industries that are the drivers of economic success today. This applies to the biotech engineer but not to the welder, who has more replaceable skills.

According to one estimate, 80 percent of new jobs in 2016 were created in metropolitan areas of 1,000,000 or more. Counties with populations below 250,000 actually had a net loss of jobs (Bishop 2017). Small metro residents are feeling it, too: Voters in small metros showed their frustrations by favoring Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election by nearly 20 percentage points, almost the same as rural voters (Florida 2017). Struggling World is close by, too. A New York Times magazine story out of Clinton, 90 miles to our northeast, argues that the sharp statewide swing towards the Republican Party in the 2010s has its roots in the loss of college-educated young people (Tackett). In Iowa, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the educated young move elsewhere to get work, while the economically-insecure folk who remain take out their anxieties at the polls, leading to policy outcomes with mostly symbolic payoffs that if anything just create frustrations for the cities that are the engines of the states' economies.

There aren't enough data in the study from Cedar Rapids, but what there are would put us in the "stabilized" group: 2016 median family income ($63385) is up 6.4 percent since 2009. That makes sense when you consider that our catastrophic flood occurred in 2008, and much federal aid and private investment has followed. Compared to 1999, though, we're down 2.7 percent.

If we don't know how we got stabilized--or worse, are naive about how we got here--how do we avoid regressing to the mean? Does Cedar Rapids, despite its being a small city, have a thick enough labor market to retain college-educated young people through lean times as well as fat? (The current national bull market, seven years on, won't last forever.) One way to enlarge the labor market could be to enlarge the scope of the city by strengthening connections with Iowa City, including better intracity transportation by which I do not mean adding another lane to I-380. Further strengthen those connections with a regional revenue-sharing agreement with a non-compete provision so area municipalities work together to make an appealing, resilient region.

More questions: can we do better at retaining young, educated people, while building an economy (and a community) that includes everyone? Is the city's financial conditions strong enough to sustain us through whatever history and the economy bring next?

Aaron Horn, from his Twitter page

Aaron Horn clearly thinks Cedar Rapids has the potential to remain strong, so we'll give him the last word.

I think we [in the State of Iowa] have a lot of work to do. Generally, especially here at NewBoCo, we just feel like it's not enough. We feel like we're doing a lot here at NewBoCo and it's not enough.... We just take that on personally as we're not just going to sit around and say, "The State of Iowa is not doing enough." We're just going to dig in our heels and say, "Where are the gaps, and what do we need to do to fill that?"

MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
Justin Golbabai, "What Happens if the Delivery Trucks Don't Come," Strong Towns, 18 October 2017
"The Right Way to Help Declining Places," Economist, 21 October 2017
Ellen Shepard, "Chicagoans Had Better Take a Hard and Wary Look at Any Deal to Woo Amazon," Chicago Sun-Times, 28 September 2017