Brian,
The first idea that "Since they won't be living in the places more
than 5 or 10 years they don't care if the place is ugly to most people
or shoddily constructed. This leaves the rest of the population with
only ugly and shoddy houses to choose from when they eventually need to
move." is complete and utter nonsense and, if an accurate representation
of what your professor said, shamefuly ignorant.
As has already been pointed out people certainly care about the resale
value of their housing and that means they implicitly care about the
value of their house even into the far future when they will not be
living in it.
This doesn't mean that no ugly or cheap (not shoddily) housing will
be built. Sometimes it is better to build cheap and ugly than expensive
and beautiful and the market will supply appropriately.
The prisoner's dilemma idea regarding neighborhood improvement is a
real, if not overwhelmingly important problem. The most difficult
example is where improving the neighborhood requires a concerted effort
- this is usually not in things like painting but in controlling crime,
pushing drug dealers out of houses, taking control of the neighborhood
etc. - lots of things could be said here about the slow extension of the
boundaries of good neighborhoods ("gentrification"), privatizing streets
(as in St. Louis), organizing neighborhood watches and crime patrols
etc. There is no easy solution. Perhaps the best answer is not to get
into this situation in the first place (on which see below). But it is
certainly false to think that this is a situation in which government is
obviously superior to voluntary processes. The fact that what kills a
neighborhood is usually lack of crime control should indicate that
clearly eneough.
On building new developments to overcome these problems see the
following recent article from The Economist.
The Independent Institute and the University of Michigan Press will
also have a book out on these sorts of issues, both historical and
contemporary, in the new year callled The Voluntary City edited by
myself, David Beito and Peter Gordon (who is at USC).
Best
Alex
--
AMERICA'S NEW UTOPIAS
Private housing associations increasingly lay down the laws that
middle-class
Americans live by. What are they doing to the country?
HEAD north out of Phoenix, Arizona, up the I-17. Drive past the signs
for Happy
Valley Road, Carefree Highway and, less auspiciously, one advising you
not to
pick up hitchhikers because you are passing a federal prison. Eventually
you
come to one for "Anthem by Del Webb".
Anthem feels more like a luxury holiday resort than a town. It includes
a water
park, with Disneyesque water slides, a children's railway, hiking
trails,
tennis courts, a rock-climbing wall, two golf courses, several spotless
parks,
a supermarket mall, two churches, a school and, for those who want a
little
more security, the Anthem Country Club, a gated (and guarded) community.
Anthem, which is planned to have 12,500 homes, opened in 1999. Its
houses and
roads look spotless. One reason for this is that everybody who buys a
house in
Anthem has to follow certain covenants, conditions and restrictions
(CCGBPRs),
governing everything from the colour of your house to whether you can
put your
car on blocks outside it (you can't). Everybody in Anthem, except the
construction workers, seems to be white.
Anthem sounds like an exclusive enclave for the rich. Far from it: homes
start
at a distinctly modest $155,000. Even the residents of the Anthem
Country Club
hardly seem posh. They tend to laugh at the rules, regarding them, like
the
long commute to Phoenix, as part of the price. Why did one young mother
come
here? "Because it's safe, because there are activities, because it's,
well,
like us."
Indeed, Anthem is not bucking a trend, but joining it. In many of the
fastest-growing parts of America, development is being driven by
"master-planned communities" of one sort or another. In big cities half
the new
home sales are in association-managed communities, according to the
Community
Associations Institute. Altogether, some 47m people--one in six
Americans--live
in 18m homes in 230,000 communities and pay around $35 billion in fees
every
year. Around 1.25m people serve on community-association boards.
Nowadays, whoever you are, there is probably a community planned with
you in
mind. In Nevada, a 55-acre community called Front Sight, featuring
streets with
names like Second Amendment Drive and Sense of Duty Way, is being built
for gun
enthusiasts (people who buy an acre plot get lifetime use of the 22
planned
ranges, an Uzi machinegun and a safari in Africa). In Baton Rouge,
Louisiana,
one gated community seems to have been taken over by black rap stars. In
poor
areas of Chicago, residents have set up gated communities to ward off
crime.
Though most of these places are in the west and the south, they crop up
all
over the country.
Legally speaking, there are three different kinds of association. The
commonest, about 60% of the total, are home-owner associations: a house
buyer
also becomes a member of an association that owns the common areas,
levies dues
and sets rules. Another 30% or so are condominiums--typically flats in a
single
building--where the whole building is owned by a condominium
association. The
remaining 8% are co-operatives, which are like condos, except that the
owners
have shares in the co-op; most of these are in New York. Of all these,
some
20,000 units, housing 8m people, are gated communities.
The CCGBPRs vary. In some cases, they just govern how you sell your
house. But
the list of rules seems to be getting longer. Some residents have to
cough up
for maintaining the roads, pavements and street lights, looking after
the parks
and providing security. A maximum size for dogs--usually 30lbs--is
increasingly
common. Leisure World, California, has its own television station. The
proliferation of CCGBPRs is driven by the trend towards master-planned
communities (like Anthem), where the developer tries to create not just
a
cluster of homes but a way of life.
The two models for master-planned communities both date back to the
1960s:
Irvine, in southern California, and Sun City, outside Phoenix. The whole
of
Irvine was built by one firm, the Irvine Company, which says confidently
that
its present population of 200,000 should double in the next 20 years.
The
company presides over Irvine in an avuncular manner. Apart from laying
down the
CCGBPRs, it lures in businesses (the Irvine Spectrum business park is
one of
the fastest-growing in the country), and in 1961 it gave 1,000 acres to
set up
the local branch of the University of California. Irvine's 75,000 homes
are
divided into 25 villages (some gated, most not) which collect the dues
and
watch over the rules.
The result, argues the Irvine Company, is "smart growth". Whereas many
Californians spend hours commuting in their cars, 60% of Irvine
Spectrum's
workers live within 15 minutes of their jobs. Unplanned towns tend to
eat into
parks, but 40% of Irvine's space will remain unbuilt-on forever. And
then there
are all those nice little things. Graffiti are quickly removed; there
are no
billboards on the freeways; construction workers have to spray water to
keep
down the dust.
Sun City, the other great model, is a town of 46,000 people built by Del
Webb
on the other side of Phoenix from Anthem. This is a retirement
community, still
probably the main section of the market. Retiring to one of these
communities
(Sun City alone has bred a dozen places with the same name) has become
almost a
routine part of middle-class life.
Many of these towns require at least one person in each house to be 55
or
older, and exclude children. Leisure World, another pioneer from the
1960s, has
20,000 people with an average age of 77. The west is littered with
elderly
Chicagoans who left the Windy City because of the cold and now can't
stop
moaning about their air-conditioning bills. Even Rabbit Angstrom, John
Updike's
American Everyman, ended up in a Florida condo.
But the retirement market is changing. Witness the newest Sun City
outside
Phoenix--a computerised, Starbucked, multi-gym affair aimed at "active
adults".
By 2010, there will be 75m Americans aged 55 or more. People now live
about 15
years longer than when the first Sun City was built, but most of the
surge in
numbers by 2010 will come from the 76m members of the baby-boom
generation, now
moving towards retirement.
The older sort of retirement community is not exactly a senile nursing
home
(there were two dozen complaints about couples having sex outdoors at
Sun City
West last year, the average age of the offenders being 73). But the
baby-boomers represent a new challenge. Zoomers--Del Webb's name for the
first
group of retiring boomers--prefer to retire early (Del Webb's research
shows
one in three planning to retire before 60), but without giving up work
completely. Retirement for them will be a third age, still full of
assorted
activities.
WHY THEY KEEP GROWING
Demographics partly explains the growth of planned communities. But
there are
two deeper forces at work: American Utopianism, and distrust of
government.
Evan McKenzie, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and
author
of "Privatopia" (Yale University Press, 1994), argues that, whereas
European
Utopians tended to concentrate on changing the society around them,
American
ones preferred to go off and create a new world somewhere else. Some
cities-on-a-hill have been built by religious fervour. More often,
immigrants
simply want to use America's empty space to create a better life.
Contemplating
the "uncontaminated" wilderness of the west, Thomas Paine once mused,
"We have
it in our power to begin the world all over again."
A similar optimism, if not quite so elegantly phrased, litters the
literature
of planned communities. The other side of the coin is pessimism
about--and
often disdain for--the services that public cities provide. The
commonest worry
is security (hence all those gates, though there is not much evidence
that
gated communities are safer than non-gated ones). But there are also
concerns
about education, health care, transport: everything the public sector is
supposed to provide.
Compare Valencia, a fast-growing "private" city an hour north of Los
Angeles,
with the San Fernando Valley, which is the northern part of that city,
and has
provided around a quarter of Valencia's 42,000 people. Children in the
San
Fernando Valley are condemned to schools run by LA's notorious Unified
School
District; Valencia's schools are excellent. People walk in the Valley
only if
they run out of petrol; Valencia has 25 miles of PASEOS for people to
jog and
bike along. Crime is high in the Valley; Valencia is part of Santa
Clairita,
one of the safest cities in the country. Thanks to smart growth,
two-thirds of
the homes in Valencia are within a quarter of a mile of school, shops
and
library. If only, moan Angelenos.
Joel Kotkin, author of "The New Geography" (Random House, 2000), calls
the rise
of places like Valencia "an escape to sanity" from the corruption and
inefficiency of big-city government. Community associations took off in
California in the 1970s, the same decade as the passing of Proposition
13,
which cut taxes for local government. And their growth has also
coincided with
that of private schools and private security guards; the latter now
outnumber
the "public" police by four to one.
So are planned communities a good thing? For the Americans inside them,
the
answer is usually yes. "Do I like being told that I have to warn the
security
guards that I am going to have a party, or that I cannot put up a
basketball
hoop in my driveway?" asks one Irvineite. "Of course I don't. But it's
not
something that keeps me awake at night." There is a widespread feeling
that
housing-association boards attract the worst busybodies in town. Yet
still the
queue of applicants goes on growing.
THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE SCHISM
What about America as a whole? These are, still, mainly white places. In
five
days THE ECONOMIST met only one black resident and no Latinos in a
string of
planned communities across the west and the south-west. This may change,
as
America's middle class grows steadily more multi-coloured; but for now
the
juxtaposition of white Sun Cities and Latino local schools in Arizona is
strange, even troubling.
A more general worry is that a growing part of the middle class is
abandoning
the state: living on private roads, sending its children to private
schools,
paying for its own private police force, playing golf at private clubs.
Why
bother supporting public services when you get all yours delivered
privately?
And what about all those poorer people, stuck with public housing,
public
schools and public transport? From the right, Charles Murray has talked
of
America's coming "caste society", with old-style cities becoming like
Indian
reservations. From the left, Robert Reich fears a secession of the
successful.
This is an exaggeration. There are occasional examples of selfish
behaviour:
some elderly gated communities have voted not to let public schools
within
their walls. But there is no evidence that whites in planned communities
are
any more hostile to government spending than those outside. The mayor of
Irvine, Larry Agran (a left-wing Democrat who once ran for president),
says the
people of Irvine are far more involved in both their state and local
governments than people in Los Angeles, where he used to live.
To be sure, the growth of planned communities can eat into the authority
of the
state. Robert Nelson, of the University of Maryland, points to two
examples.
The CCGBPRs trump a good deal of municipal law (for instance in terms of
property-sales contracts). Second, a community can set rules about who
is
allowed to live in it.
For Mr Agran, all this is worthwhile. The real evils of life in southern
California, he says, are things like "the separation of the workplace
from the
home". In communities with smart growth this is a fading problem. Mr
Kotkin
agrees: "It would be perverse to limit the growth of successful places
that
people want to live in."
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http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=760545
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