The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt

  The official projection had been that the system would attract twenty-six thousand riders a day; it averaged thirty-three thousand from the beginning. Those numbers weren’t necessarily conclusive evidence of anything; cities have learned to lowball their initial transit projections to achieve the public relations triumph of exceeding them. The real evidence in Phoenix is the experience of riding the trains. One can board at almost any time of day or evening and find the cars filled with riders from virtually every demographic category in the region: students, people going out to lunch or dinner, suburbanites coming in for sports events or bar hopping, tourists, lawyers with offices in the midtown corridor riding downtown to City Hall or the county courthouse. During much of the day, every car seems to be crowded with bicycles; one often has to maneuver around a cluster of bikes just to get to a seat. People who live along the transit line are riding bikes to the stations, loading them aboard the train, and riding them to their final destinations once they disembark.

  The sleek new Phoenix light-rail system, built in part to revitalize a nondescript downtown, attracts relatively few commuters but an unexpectedly large number of recreation and entertainment seekers. (photo credit 8.2)

  The one major constituency that doesn’t use light-rail in large numbers is the commuting population. Light-rail serves downtown Phoenix mainly as a recreational tool, but an effective one. At the end of the first year, it was difficult to find anyone other than free-market ideological zealots who didn’t consider the costly experiment at least moderately successful. “Now that it’s up,” said city planner Carol Johnson, “everyone is asking when do we get it in our neighborhood.”

  The students riding Valley Metro, going back and forth from the main Arizona State University campus in suburban Tempe, were in many ways the most important component. Arizona State president Michael Crow, presiding over the unwieldiness of the nation’s single most populous campus, with more than sixty-five thousand enrolled, saw downtown in terms almost as messianic as those of Mayor Gordon. He decided on a long-term plan to bring fifteen thousand of the students to a new downtown campus, a species of urban revival more ambitious than any other city had dared to try. “Our presence will be catalytic in nature,” Crow predicted. The mayor was equally exultant. “ASU downtown is more than a few nuggets,” he said. “It’s a gold mine. We’ve hit the mother lode.”

  Voters approved spending $225 million in public money on the new campus in 2004, as part of a $900 million bond issue that also included money for police, fire, libraries, streets, and sewers. Whatever Phoenix residents might feel about their hyperenthusiastic mayor, there was no disputing that he was a genius when it came to packaging ballot measures for maximum appeal.

  Creation of the new downtown campus was far from complete at the start of the new decade in 2010. Crow had moved the nursing, social work, and public policy programs into downtown Phoenix, and built a striking steel-and-glass building for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. More than eight thousand students were taking at least one class in downtown Phoenix every week. Many of these, especially in social work and nursing, were midcareer students who left immediately after class and played no real role in creating a downtown community. Still, there was a growing residential component. During the 2009–2010 school year, more than eight hundred students were living in the just-opened Taylor Place twin-tower dormitory at the north end of downtown.

  The Arizona State campus was tangible evidence of the potential that a downtown university might possess for transforming the area nearby. But it was also, in an odd way, a reminder of how far the ultimate dream of a residential downtown, with a vibrant street life, was from realization. With eight hundred students living there, Taylor Place was the single biggest residential cluster in the central downtown core. But relatively few of the students seemed to venture much farther downtown. A distressing number of the students weren’t sure exactly what existed there.

  One might be tempted to conclude, after all the false starts in the drive to create residential life in downtown Phoenix, that there was no answer to the problem. Phoenicians simply didn’t want to live there. Actually, though, there was a solution, or at least one that might well have worked had it been adequately tried and supported.

  While the big-name developers from outside were investing heavily and ultimately losing out with high-rise towers, a third-generation Phoenix builder named Eric Brown was experimenting with a different idea: much smaller apartment buildings, stucco over frame, designed to human scale and generally affordable to the middle class. Brown put these structures up in and around downtown, wherever there was a vacant lot he could afford. He generally created twenty units to the acre, much less density than the high-rises, but much more density than downtown Phoenix had had before. By 2008, there were five of these projects in central Phoenix, including Artisan Village, just north of downtown, five acres of townhouses that included ten live-work units, with retail on the bottom and condominiums above reserved for the merchants.

  None of Brown’s projects was as striking as the tall towers, but they were generally pleasing to look at, and they had one crucial advantage: They sold. Virtually every unit was occupied, even during the leanest recession years, and those that were resold generally went for markups of as much as 50 percent. In fact, though, not many of them did go on the market for resale. “People weren’t buying to flip,” as Brown put it. His projects had the lowest turnover rates of anything being built in metropolitan Phoenix. Brown’s admirers felt he might be laying the groundwork for a twenty-first-century Western equivalent of New York brownstone neighborhoods.

  Brown’s buildings varied slightly in height, but all of them were less than sixty feet, because sixty feet is the threshold that triggers much more onerous building code requirements for things like plumbing and fire prevention. The majority of the buildings were five stories, four for residential units, with a retail podium extending out on the ground floor. For Brown, this was not only a business decision but a matter of urban philosophy. “Life happens under five stories,” he said. “Everything above is just a place to pack people.”

  IF ERIC BROWN sees an element of magic in the five-story building, he is not the first one. The boulevards that Haussmann built in Paris were lined with five-story buildings; so was most of the Ringstrasse in nineteenth-century Vienna. Of course, there were nonaesthetic reasons for that uniformity—in the days before elevators, five sets of stairs were about as much as anybody could be expected to climb, and the absence of steel-frame construction made building much taller than that difficult anyway.

  So Paris and Vienna became five-story cities. And many consequences flowed from that. People on fifth-floor balconies could lean over their flower boxes and watch the action on the street below. The pedestrians could wave or talk to those above. Residence and street were integrated in a way entirely different from anything that prevailed at the time in neighborhoods of single-story townhouses, or later in neighborhoods where the apartment buildings were skyscrapers.

  Is the charm of five-story scale replicable in a twenty-first-century American city? Is it replicable, most incongruously of all, in a place like Phoenix? One is tempted to say the idea is absurd—but there is the fact that the handful of five-story experiments that Eric Brown built there remained fully occupied through the hardest of recession years, while the ambitious skyscraper condominiums went unsold.

  Brown is not the only developer or civic leader who envisions a successful midrise downtown in Phoenix mixing residences, retail, and offices. But before anything like that could happen, the city would have to deal with a mundane but serious problem: parking. Phoenicians are almost as preoccupied with where they park their cars as with where they park themselves. In the suburbs, the general rule is four or five parking spaces for every thousand square feet of living space; in the high-rise downtown condominiums and office buildings, it is three per thousand square feet. A five-story residence can provide lots of amenities, but copious p
arking is not one of them. So before Phoenix can begin to consider seriously the vision of Eric Brown and others who think like him, it will have to recover from its parking obsession.

  That will not be easy. “The less frequently you use your car,” says Grady Gammage, “the more paranoid you are about where it goes. If we followed the lead of other cities and prohibited new parking in downtown, the likely result would be no new development downtown.”

  The creativity of Eric Brown’s solution suggests one important thing about Phoenix: With an ample supply of empty land in the center and very little of historical value to protect, it has the ability, in theory at least, to build a downtown that would possess many of the traditional urbanist virtues—street life, compactness, casual sociability—and yet would not resemble the downtowns of older cities. The civic leadership clearly believes this is possible, even if it has little sense of what the ultimate result might be. Don Keuth of the Phoenix Community Alliance believes his city has the potential to create a brand-new form of urbanism that could serve as a model for desert cities all over the world. He thinks a density of ten to twelve units an acre is entirely feasible. “In ten years,” Keuth says, “this could be one of the great downtowns of the United States. I’m not sure what it will look like.”

  No one else is sure, either. But no serious observer of life in the Valley of the Sun minimizes the likely resistance to anything very dramatic. The reluctance to ease up on parking requirements, trivial as it may seem, is a good symbol of that resistance. So is the disgust some newly arrived downtown condo dwellers expressed when they found a hotel garbage Dumpster not far from their doorsteps. (No one on Wall Street would have given it a second thought, no matter how much they had paid for their living space.) And so is the way drivers respond to even a small increase in the number of downtown pedestrians who impede their progress. Some are surprised when they learn they are supposed to yield the right of way. “This isn’t an urban city,” Keuth admits. “It wasn’t set up to be an urban place. We’re literally creating it from scratch.”

  But by 2010, Phoenix did have one quality that it shared with all other large American cities—a cohort of people in their twenties and early thirties who seemed to be tiring of exurban life. “We have all these people who came here after World War Two,” said city planning manager Carol Johnson, “who are terrified we’re going to take their green lawns away from them with density. But their children don’t feel that way. They want a more urban experience.”

  Indeed, when the Gallup Poll surveyed young people in Arizona (most of them in the Phoenix area) in 2009, only 11 percent gave their community top grades as a place to live. A full 29 percent said they would move to another city or state if they had the choice. “When I think about Chicago,” an Arizona State junior told Gallup, “I think about twenty-four/seven energy. And great food. When I think about Austin, I think young people and music.… Will I be here in five years? No.”

  One survey response does not prove anything. But it suggests what the elite in Phoenix worries about, and why it has embarked so many times on the difficult project of trying to create recognizable urban life. In the words of Grady Gammage Jr., “There is something genuinely vital about a city that we are lacking here. And we want that. We worry about the image of Phoenix being all golf courses and old people.”

  In the end, leaders in postwar cities such as Phoenix crave urbanity not only because they have enjoyed it in Portland or San Francisco, but because they believe the future of their region depends on it. If only there were a hip music scene; if only they could have a safe, vibrant street life that extended beyond working hours; if only they could have thirty thousand people living downtown—if they could have all these things, they could be twenty-first-century cities with hearts instead of huge twentieth-century population clusters aging before their time. As Don Keuth likes to put it, “We’re not a global city. But we can be. We just have to think about how to get there.”

  It’s Pinocchio’s dream translated to urban scale.

  CHAPTER NINE

  URBANIZING THE SUBURBS

  WHERE DO THE MILLENNIALS want to live? In many ways, this is the demographic question that will determine the face of metropolitan America in the next twenty years. The strands of opinion on this issue have hardened into what amounts to an ideological debate. On one side stand the prosuburban, largely free-market scholars who believe that once the economic downturn ends, America will resume its twentieth-century thrust outward and seek ever-newer greenfield homes on plots of land farther and farther from the city, transporting themselves back and forth by means of the automobile.

  They have some statistics to back them up. One study by a real estate consulting firm in 2009 reported that only 17 percent of Generation Y (the “millennials,” born roughly between 1980 and 1995) expressed a preference for urban living, most likely a rental apartment, over a suburban mode of life. But there are equally compelling, and strikingly different, results on the other side. A competing study by the consulting firm RCLCO, in 2008, revealed an almost precisely opposite result: 77 percent of Generation Y wanted to live some variant of the urban life.

  “Generation Y’s attitudes toward home ownership have been changed by the housing crisis and the recession,” the Urban Land Institute found in commenting on the RCLCO study. “The number of people trapped by underwater homes that cannot be sold and the millions of foreclosures are tempering their interest in buying their own homes and they will be renters by necessity rather than by choice for years ahead.” In many if not most cases, that means urbanized rather than traditional suburban rentals.

  Between 1990 and 2007, the Urban Land Institute found, central cities increased their share of housing permits within their metropolitan areas by more than double. This increase continued after the housing recession caused the number of permits to plummet in the outer suburbs. What is more, statistics showed, housing in cities and inner suburbs held their value during the recession far better than their exurban counterparts.

  This seems to me a case in which common sense wins a battle of dueling statistics. Most of the major demographic trends right now in America work in favor of an urban preference, at least among a significant cohort of the emerging adult population: smaller households, later marriages, decisions not to marry at all, decisions not to have children, the emergence of a huge and active baby boom population in its sixties and seventies—all point to some form of reemergence of urban choice.

  But suppose one grants many of the predictions made by those who attempt to debunk any significant back-to-the-city movement among the millennial generation. The generation is simply so large—by one conventional measure, sixty to seventy million people—that even a respectable minority of this cohort seeking an urban life is bound to change American metropolitan areas dramatically.

  In a poll cited by The New York Times in 2009, 45 percent of Americans between the ages of twenty and thirty-five said they would like to live in New York City someday if they could. This is an absurdly large number of people—well over 20 million, in fact. It’s a safe assumption that, other than the ones who already live in New York, not too many of them will ever get there. So the poll does not offer much insight into the future demographics of the nation’s largest city. But it says a great deal about the values, tastes, and wishes of an enormous group of American young people.

  There is a thirst for urban life among the millennial generation. It shows up in polls, in anecdotal conversation, in blogs and other casual writing. It is not based primarily on watching television shows such as Friends or Seinfeld, though those should not be discounted. It is based on an inchoate feeling that the cul-de-sac suburbia in which millions of them grew up is a cul-de-sac in more ways than one: It cuts off not only streets, but diversity and the casual outdoor experience they feel is crucial to meaningful human sociability.

  Once again, it is necessary to say that exurbs are not going to empty out in the coming generation. They remain home to mil
lions of current residents with families who like the space, are concerned about safety, and want to stay put; newcomers to this country who are determined to avoid the crowding they encountered in other parts of the world; and poorer people who are able to find acceptable housing on the periphery that is not available in the center.

  One may object that the city-seeking young people are not a representative sample of their age group. They are more affluent, more often single, less affected by family life, more interested in spending an ample supply of disposable income on the entertainments available to them in urban precincts. But that seems to me only to provide evidence for the central arguments of this book. The inhabitants of the center cities of the twenty-first century will be largely those with money—those who have the greatest choice about where to live. Those who inhabit the periphery will be for the most part those for whom prices in the center are prohibitive. As the Urban Land Institute concludes, “Once the economy recovers and household formation resumes, the demand for urban housing will greatly outstrip the supply.”

  SO TO ME, the bulk of the evidence points to the emergence of a city-seeking young population cohort—mostly singles, couples, and families with very young children. The question will be where to put them. This might not seem a very difficult question in light of the glut of empty or near-empty condominiums that line downtown Miami, Phoenix, and other Sun Belt cities that overbuilt in the center during the housing boom of the last decade.

  But it is a crucial question nevertheless. Most cities are not Miami or Phoenix. They are more like Houston, with a tiny supply of downtown housing and little prospect of building or converting much more. Or they are more like Washington, where Dupont Circle, the traditionally hip point of entry for young people in the baby boom and Generation X, is now too expensive for their millennial successors. There are several answers to the question of where we are going to put the emerging urban-seeking cohort. One, which might be called the D.C.-Chicago option, is simply to expand the range of desirable housing gradually outward from the center of the city, attracting young people to neighborhoods that were considered too dangerous to live in only a decade ago.