Tag Archives: housing

Manhattan micro apartments will come at a high price

by rikkiqlyons Posted on January 23, 2013

Manhattan micro apartments will come at a high price

By Susie Cagle

Are you sick of micro apartments yet? Well, too bad. Yesterday New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winner of a competition to design teensy live-in closets for an East Side apartment complex of 55 units. Here are drawings of the winning design, showing how an apartment might be adapted throughout the day:

From the Associated Press:

To make up for the shoe-box dimensions, the building will offer residents common spaces like a rooftop garden and lounge area on nearly every floor. The aim is to offer more such tiny apartments throughout the city as affordable options for the young singles, cash-poor and empty nesters who are increasingly edged out of the nation’s most expensive real-estate market…

If the pilot program is successful, New York could ultimately overturn a requirement established in 1987 that all new apartments be at least 400 square feet.

A third of Manhattan residents live alone, and apparently hate the idea of communal housing, so Bloomberg says the city needs these units to “keep us strong in the 21st Century” with “new ideas” and the young gentry that hatch them. Young gentry like Manhattan resident Sam Neuman, who loves his tiny apartment, but not in a super-healthy way:

“I’ve developed this weird Stockholm Syndrome, which you identify with your captors,” said the 31-year-old publicist. “When I go to other people’s apartments, I think, ‘Why do they need more than one bedroom?’ I’m really very happy here. There’s not really time to let things accumulate because … where would I put them?”

Neuman’s point is legit: Doing more with less is great. More people want to live alone than ever before, and tiny house porn is the cutest of all the house porns. But these micro units are not an affordable housing strategy, though they’re often pitched as exactly that. In many cities, they’re exempt from rent-control measures.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 40 percent of the apartments in the city’s first micro-unit building will rent out at under market rate, but most will cost as much as a standard and much larger studio, further driving up the per-square-foot price of housing in one of the country’s most expensive cities.

Micro apartments address density, but not diversity or affordability. If we want our cities to grow, we need to make room for families and others who are not content or able to squeeze into homes the size of a parking space.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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California enjoys and/or suffers from a historic baby bust

by trasze2aja Posted on January 14, 2013

California enjoys and/or suffers from a historic baby bust

By Susie Cagle

Despite what my Facebook friend feed may be implying lately, California as a whole is not bursting at the seams with cute drooly babies. In fact, the Golden State is having a population crisis, at least by American standards. According to a new report from the University of Southern California, the state is making a “historic transition”: California’s fertility rate has dropped to 1.94 children per woman, below the 2.1 rate that replaces and grows the population and the economy. The U.S. birthrate was 2.06 children last year. Demographers are calling the drop, which has affected all racial and ethnic groups, “unprecedented” (and “European”).

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“Kids are no longer overrunning us. Now they’re in short supply,” demographer Dowell Myers told the San Jose Mercury News. “It changes the priorities for the state.”

Post-baby-boom, California had no population worries. In 1970, kids accounted for a third of the state’s population. Now they’re projected to make up one-fifth by 2030.

The Wall Street Journal is particularly hysterical about what a lower population might mean for California’s economic growth.

“Unless the birthrate picks up, we are going to need more immigrants. If neither happens, we are going to have less growth,” said [Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy]. The report wasn’t optimistic, saying that “with migration greatly reduced…outsiders are much less likely to come to the rescue.”

Investments in the state’s education system will be vital to meet labor-force needs and prevent the economy from contracting, said Mr. Levy. With less migration to the state, the skills and human capital necessary to keep California’s economy afloat will need to be homegrown, both Mr. Levy and Mr. Myers said.

With more than 90% of the state’s children under age 10 born in the state, “the majority of the next generation of workers will have been shaped by California’s health and education systems,” Mr. Myers said. “It’s essential that we nurture our human capital.”

Yes, nurturing, let’s do that. But all these people are talking like California’s population is shrinking, which it’s not at all: Between 2010 and 2012, it grew by nearly 700,000 people, in large part due to immigration. That’s just a lot less growth than before.

It may be historic, but it’s hardly surprising. California suffered some of the worst fall-out from the housing boom and bust, has filled its jails well over capacity, and has cut services across the board, while many of its municipalities, as the Wall Street Journal put it, are slouching toward insolvency. At least a fifth of California’s kids grow up in poverty. Why should we be sad there aren’t more of them?

California’s kids will unfortunately face a heavier burden in taking care of the state’s booming elderly population. But with more kids, they’d also face a heavier burden in competing for dwindling resources. A smaller population is a more sustainable one in the long run. Immediate economic concerns aside, a goal of perpetual, endless growth isn’t good for anyone, the cute and drooly among us included.

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NYC public housing claims it’s going green, but stymies residents’ green efforts

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 3, 2013

NYC public housing claims it’s going green, but stymies residents’ green efforts

By Philip Bump

To its credit, the New York City Housing Authority (popularly known as NYCHA) launched an effort five years ago to “go green.” “NYCHA is going green,” its website announces, by focusing on recycling, energy efficiency, and community gardens.

HLIT

An apartment tower in Ft. Greene.

And the website is about all the help NYCHA is offering to public-housing residents. But as The New York Times reports, “many residents say the agency has failed to follow through. The agency, they say, has not been supportive of residents’ efforts and has in some circumstances stood in their way.”

Residents are encouraged to recycle, but:

[M]ore than half of the 334 public housing projects in the city have no recycling bins, according to agency documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request. That may help explain why the recycling rate is so low in neighborhoods with a large number of public housing projects — in the South Bronx, home to 14 projects, the rate is just under 5 percent.

Margarita López, a New York City Housing Authority commissioner who leads the agency’s environmental initiatives, said the collection rate was low because in most projects it was easier to throw recyclables in the regular trash.

The agency “has chutes in every floor where people put their garbage through that chute, and they do not separate the recycling material,” Ms. López said. “We have no choice but to encourage people to bring the recycling down to the first floor of buildings. We have no choice but to tell people that this is something you must do for the quality of life and for themselves.”

They’re allowed to start gardens, but:

On a recent Saturday, Ashley Paniagua walked down a brick pathway that snaked between the towering Manhattanville Houses in Harlem, and headed toward a small garden she had helped plant months earlier. But the gates to the gardens were locked — the government worker who opened them every morning had yet to do so.

“It’s a lot of politics,” Ms. Paniagua, 26, said. “You’ve got to go through so many people, just to get something simple done.” …

In 2009, when Ms. Paniagua decided to plant gardens on the lawns at the Manhattanville Houses, she said, she had no idea that the process of getting permits and financing would take almost three years.

One resident puts the concerns eloquently:

Nova Strachan, who lives in the Union Avenue Consolidation houses in the Bronx, said that when the agency set up its Web site on environmental sustainability, it installed 178,000 energy-efficient light bulbs throughout the city. Ms. Strachan said she had hoped the agency was beginning to tackle the backlog of repairs and sustainability at the same time. Now, she said, her enthusiasm has waned.

“The whole green thing feels like it was a buzzword,” she said. “It feels like it’s fading out.”

The agency’s “green” page suggests another way in which its efforts haven’t come to fruition. A May 2011 entry is titled, “Rockaway Residents Learn How to Weather the Storm,” emphasizing how to prepare for bad weather. As the response to Hurricane Sandy showed, NYCHA didn’t exactly back up that information, either.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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U.S. cities are getting denser

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 20, 2012

U.S. cities are getting denser

By Susie Cagle

The U.S. EPA released a report this week on how our cities are growing. So there’s the first good news: They’re growing! But you knew that already. Other good news: Nearly 75 percent of major metro areas saw a higher proportion of housing being built in already-developed areas (“infill” in planning jargon) from 2005 to 2009 compared to 2000 to 2004. The bad? From sea to shining sea, we still really love to sprawl. Almost all major metro areas continued to grow outward faster than they grew inward.

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Community health centers rise up from toxic brownfields

by Myrna Posted on December 12, 2012

Community health centers rise up from toxic brownfields

By Susie Cagle

If poor communities aren’t living in the shadow of active industrial pollution, they’re often living in its graveyard. Industrial polluted brownfields are fenced and festering from California to Maine, frequently situated near low-income residents. When developers come to clean up and build on the sites, too often they plan projects that will push out rather than benefit the people who live nearby.

Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection

A brownfield in Worcester, Mass.

But today The New York Times points to a different kind of trend in brownfields development: building health centers for low-income local residents on sites formerly occupied by meatpacking plants, gas stations, and factories. These kinds of projects stand to bolster communities, not just property values, and they’re still serious investment opportunities for health-care companies.

[There’s] a nationwide trend to replace contaminated tracts in distressed neighborhoods with health centers , in essence taking a potential source of health problems for a community and turning it into a place for health care. In recent years, health care facilities have been built on cleaned-up sites in Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon and California.

“These health care providers are getting good at it,” said Elizabeth Schilling, policy manager for Smart Growth America, an advocacy group. “They have internalized the idea that this is an opportunity for them.”

Because these sites are contaminated, many qualify for government tax credits and grants, providing health centers with vital seed money to build. Community health centers, by design, exist to serve populations in poor neighborhoods, where there also tend to be available but contaminated properties like old gas stations, repair shops and industrial sites.

In fact, many of the country’s 450,000 contaminated sites, known as brownfields, are in poor neighborhoods, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These tracts are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities because contaminated sites are more difficult to redevelop if property values are depressed. Banks are often reluctant to finance construction on a property that might require a costly cleanup.

Brownfields projects can qualify for redevelopment grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development plus tied-in HUD loans and state grants. Florida in particular has promoted the construction of health centers on brownfields with tax credits of up to $500,000.

“The concept in Florida has proven to be not only needed, but viable,” said Michael R. Goldstein, an environmental lawyer in Florida who specializes in brownfield redevelopment. “We are just at the beginning of the journey here. I predict that in the next two years we’ll have close to two dozen across the state.”

How do you improve an impoverished, troubled community for the people who live there now and not the people who would move there if it were less impoverished, less troubled? (Coughgentrificationcough.) This is a question that governments ask almost as infrequently as developers. Grant-qualifying brownfields development projects can be anything from pricey restaurants and mixed-income condominiums to these health centers. If this health-center trend continues, especially in unlikely Florida, it might encourage other communities to redevelop around the needs of their actual residents.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Will twentysomethings head for the suburbs?

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2012

Will twentysomethings head for the suburbs?

By Susie Cagle

The millennial generation stands to shape our cities for decades to come, largely because it’s so big: 86 million, compared to 77 million baby boomers. Millennials are just starting to turn 30, and middle-aged demographers are wondering how many of them will run to the suburbs like their parents and grandparents before them.

s.yume

From USA Today:

Now, cities face a new demographic reality: The young and single are aging and having children. If the pattern of the past 50 years holds, they might soon set their sights on suburbia.

“We know young people move the most,” says Richard Florida, whose book The Rise of the Creative Class published 10 years ago helped spark the wooing of young professionals to revive declining urban centers. “So capturing people early on in their lives in a metro really matters. It’s important to compete with suburbs for people once they get a little older and have children.”

The older they get, the less likely people are to live in cities, according to recent Census data. The peak age for urban living is 25 to 27, when 20% of that age group are nestled in urban centers. By the age of 41, about a quarter have moved to the suburbs.

Experts say getting cities baby-ready would entail improving schools, building housing near public transit, and expanding and improving parks. That all sounds well and good to me, but here’s the hitch: Demographers say millennials want to bring the suburbs to the city with more low-rise townhouses and single-family homes instead of apartments. So much for that density thing?

Cities are growing, but it’s still unclear just how much they’re growing compared to the ‘burbs.

Will young people move to the ‘burbs because older people before them did, or will cities be able to retain young families?

There are still plenty of young and childless professionals for cities to pursue (the youngest Millennials are in their teens), but as the oldest move to another life stage, cities face a balancing act: Provide adult fun and culture and trendy lofts, but build family-friendly homes and child care centers at the same time.

Even with all the changes cities are making, many Millennials will head to the suburbs when they start a family — but probably not as many as in previous decades, [cities guru Richard] Florida says.

“Before, 90% to 95% would’ve moved, and I would see it more as 60% or 70% now,” he says, based on research and observations. “My hunch is many will move to a close-in suburb that’s walkable, near transit.”

My hunch, as one of these mysterious, potentially ‘burb-bound millennials? There are still lots of factors that would keep us in the cities: urban job growth, rising gas prices, the collapse of the housing market, safety improvements, declining interest in cars, delayed marriage age. These could all be good news for urban areas — even if some of us still secretly want a ranch house with a picket fence.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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