Creative Class

CNN reports:

Recent market research indicates that up to 40 percent of
households surveyed in selected metropolitan areas want to live in
walkable urban areas, said Leinberger. The desire is also substantiated
by real estate prices for urban residential space, which are 40 to 200
percent higher than in traditional suburban neighborhoods — this price
variation can be found both in cities and small communities equipped
with walkable infrastructure, he said. The result is an
oversupply of depreciating suburban housing and a pent-up demand for
walkable urban space, which is unlikely to be met for a number of
years.

We are at the inflection point of a significant change in urban structure both within regions (that is city to suburb) and between them (the globalization of the city-system). 

Your thoughts?

This new logo was released today. So how many cross-border football teams are there? The power of the mega …

Thanks so much for your help sending in stories about your places in the U.S. and Canada.  Now, I’m working on the global edition of Who’s Your City?

Now, I’d like to ask for your stories about global cities, especially from people living outside of North America.

Tell us about the place you live.  Why did you pick your city or region? How  did you go about picking it – what was your strategy? What other kinds of places did you look at?  How has that choice affected the rest of your life?   Your job or career?  Friends, family, or romantic interests?  Fulfillment and fun?  Real estate jackpots or money pits? Would you do it differently next time? What cities and regions are on your radar  for the future and why? Do you see yourself moving to another country to live/ why or why not? That’s it.

Please send your stories to Patrick Adler at
patrick.adler@rotman.utoronto.ca,or post them on the comment section of
this entry, or do both. Thanks in advance.

Yesterday, I posted the top 20 global cities based on the Mastercard
rankings and methodology. Last night, MPI, research assistant, Patrick
Adler put together a table comparing these top 20 global cities to our
own mega-region data set.  We’ll be looking at our global metro
rankings in the future.

MasterCard Rankings taken from 2008 World Centers of Commerce Index. The link is here

The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Carp:

In recent years, a generation of young people, called
the millennials, born between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, has
combined with baby boomers to rekindle demand for urban living. Today,
the subprime-mortgage crisis and $4-a-gallon gasoline are delivering
further gut punches by blighting remote subdivisions nationwide and
rendering long commutes untenable for middle-class Americans.

Just as low interest rates and aggressive mortgage
financing accelerated expansion of the suburban fringe to the point of
oversupply, “the spike in gasoline prices, layered with demographic
changes, may accelerate the trend toward closer-in living,” said Arthur
C. Nelson, director of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute in
Alexandria, Va. “All these things are piling up, and there are
fundamental changes occurring in demand for housing in most parts of
the country.”

Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the
Brookings Institution and a developer of walkable areas that combine
housing and commercial space, describes the structural shift as the
“beginning of the end of sprawl.” …

Even families who sought the suburbs or were priced
out of cities now have an economic imperative to find their way back
closer to town. Transportation is the second-biggest household expense,
after housing, and suburban families face a relatively greater gas
burden. At the same time, distant suburbs, or exurbs, where housing
growth was predicated on cheap gas, have experienced the biggest
declines in home values in the past year, according to a May report by
CEOs for Cities, a nonprofit group of public- and private-sector
officials that seeks to promote urban areas. “The gas-price spike
popped the housing bubble,” said Joe Cortright, the report’s author.

The full story is here. I still think it time costs and congestion that play the biggest role.  What do you think the geography of metropolitan America will look like in say 2025?

Lots of rankings of global cities recently.  Here’s another interesting one – from Mastercard of all places. The academic advisory group is first-rate with Saskia Sassen and Peter Taylor among others.

1.  London
2.  New York
3.  Tokyo
4.  Singapore
5.  Chicago
6.  Hong Kong
7.  Paris
8.  Frankfurt
9.  Seoul
10. Amsterdam
11. Madrid
12. Sydney
13. Toronto
14. Copenhagen
15. Zürich
16. Stockholm
17. LA
18. Philadelphia
19. Osaka
20. Milan

The full report is here.  This squares reasonably well with my priors and, well, with our global mega-region (and metro-region) data.  We’ll be looking more closely at that data but Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Copenhagen, and Stockholm seem a bit too high, while Amsterdam, Seoul, and especially Osaka seem a bit lower than I would expect, based on the mega data that is.

Your thoughts on this?

Click here to download my column in the latest edition of Tyler Brule’s Monocle.

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are
indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been
important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by
bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals.
This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special
order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the
little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants
and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the
modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who
require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and
cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a
quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was
Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain
district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who
by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North
Beach still gives continuity with the past …

Those who don’t live in such threatened districts nonetheless have a stake in
this quarrel and some skin in this game, because on the day when everywhere
looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only
that but—more impoverishingly still—we will be unable to express or even
understand or depict what we have lost.

The rest is here (h/t: Brian Knudsen). Photo from Vanity Fair.

Whenever these issues come up, I recall what Jane Jacobs once said to me: “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

Real estate economist, Richard Green thinks rising gas prices will have significant impact on real estate markets and geographic patterns (via Mark Thoma):

Over the past six years, the price of gasoline has risen about $2 per
gallon. What does this mean for relative urban land prices?

Let’s
say the average household makes five one-way trips per day–for work,
shopping, entertainment, etc. Let’s also say that the average car gets
20 mpg in city driving. Each mile of distance to work, shopping, etc.
is therefore now 50 cents per day per household more expensive than
before. A household living immediately adjascent to work and shopping
should then be willing to pay $5 per day more in rent than a household
10 miles away compared with six years ago, all else being equal. This
becomes $150 per month, or $1800 per year. Assuming a five percent cap
rate for owner occupied housing, this translates to $36,000 in relative
change in value. Given that the median house price in the US is about
$220k, this is kind of a big deal.

The assumptions here are
pretty crude (particulalry the ceteris paribus assumption), but if gas
remains at its current real price, we will see the shape of US cities
change.

Separately, the Washington Post reports that the real estate crunch is already limiting geographic mobility.

Here’s my piece in today’s Buffalo News.

There’s great excitement brewing in Toronto, where I live, over the
fact that the Bills are coming to play eight “home” games (five regular
season and three preseason) there over the next five years.

As
a longtime Bills fan and former Buffalo resident — I lived off Elmwood
Avenue and taught at the University at Buffalo in the early 1980s,
during which time I braved the cold Buffalo winters to have some of the
greatest football experiences of my life — I have to admit I was one of
the first in line to get my tickets. Rumors swirl that Toronto
interests eventually will acquire the Bills and move the team north.
For some, this is a signal that Buffalo, once the wealthier and more
vibrant of the two cities, will lose not just its home team but its
big-league status — yet another signal of the once-great industrial
mecca’s fading glory.

Instead of bemoaning Buffalo’s loss or
cheering Toronto’s gain, the binational Bills actually point the way to
a better future. In fact, when asked at a major meeting of Buffalo area
leaders several years ago (and well before I moved to Toronto) what I
would suggest to revitalize the region, I blurted out, “become a part
of Tor-Buff-Chester” — a clunky moniker for the economic powerhouse
region stretching from my new hometown to Buffalo and Rochester.

More here. That’s the Buffalo News graphic that accompanies the piece.