Choosing Where to Live
Decatur Metro | December 3, 2011 | 8:59 am
You may have noticed that I’ve very quickly fallen in love with this new Atlantic Cities blog. Here’s another one. In discussing the correlation between the rise in gas prices and bus/train ridership levels, the Atlantic uses Atlanta to demonstrate the larger trend of a “lagged effect” in adopting a new mode of transportation after a gas price spike…
Take, for instance, the case of bus ridership in Atlanta. There Lane discovered three significant behavioral elasticities at three distinct temporal lags. The first, which occurred at 0 months (or roughly the same time as the fuel hike), saw a roughly 20 percent jump in bus ridership. The second, coming at 6 months, saw a 32 percent transit rise, and the third, at 11 months, a 12 percent spike. Over the course of about a year, then, one major rise in fuel cost in Atlanta led to about a 64 percent rise in bus ridership.
Of course, the other side of this particular coin is the quality of your public transportation system itself, though Lane found some examples where particularly paltry systems in car-centric cities that saw large jumps in usage (though if he’s using %s to determine the size of his circles, it’s a lot easier for a city to double or triple usage when no one rides your buses/trains to begin with). So take it for what it’s worth.
But what all of this seemingly obvious info reemphasizes to me is that while some will eschew the car voluntarily to enjoy some of the less tangible, finer things in a more walkable world, many others won’t without a tightening of choices.
And this new opportunity of choice is one of the most unique things about this current era we’re living in. Prior to the industrial revolution, you just made due with where you lived. After that revolution, cities continued a descent into squalor as they got bigger and dirtier. They got bad enough where at the first opportunity to leave them, the rich and then the middle class hit the road, happy to endure a little time on the parkways for a quieter, less smelly life at home. This continued into the late-20th century, but during that time cities began to finally start benefiting from newer technologies that were quieter, less dirty and more efficient. They were quietly climbing their way back into competition with the suburbs as enjoyable places to live.
Counter-intuitively, the advent of internet technology seems to have only exacerbated the city’s lure. Instead of watching populations leave the horrible cities for good to live in physical isolation with their wireless devices, cities have benefited from the web’s ability to make weak communication chains stronger. Clubs, organizations, CSAs, farmers markets, small businesses with little overhead came into their own, as they were finally able to attract the necessary levels of participants without going broke. City diversity in all forms was suddenly on the rise.
And here we are today.
Cities are cleaner, quieter and more diverse than they’ve ever been. Meanwhile, the suburbs and beyond maintain the important advantage in terms of space and tout the benefits of isolation. And so, these unresolved conversations about what was once the most boring of commodities – transportation options – continue. But it’s really only interesting because of the larger options it represents. Unfortunately, we won’t resolve the fight anytime soon without some huge sea change (like much higher gas prices) because at this point they’re both still worthy opponents in the never-ending battle of where to live.
“Instead of watching populations leave the horrible cities for good to live in physical isolation with their wireless devices, cities have benefited from the web’s ability to make weak communication chains stronger.”
This is so true. Just look at the way the food trucks alert people to where they’ll be in the city with social media. Likewise I learn about all kinds of events at local restaurants and galleries the same way. Internet technology has made me more connected to the city. Being alerted to exactly what’s available in a given night takes the guess work away and makes it easier to commit to quickly heading out to nearby a local spot.
Indeedy. There was an article about Yelp a couple months back – that I kept meaning to post about but never did – that focused on how much power it had in driving local business and how it actually HURT chain restaurants. It was one of the first examples I had seen that tried to quantify the positive effect the web has had on local businesses around the world. If you’ve got a good business model and a good product, the communication model is a much lower hurdle than it used to be. People are just as aware of the new BBQ place around the corner as they are of the renovated Applebee’s.
It’s also interesting how the younger generation – myself included – openly mocks the previous generation for its choices in this arena. In many places, moving to the ‘burbs was a better choice back then. There was no internet to strengthen existing ties within the city, which affected everything from advertising for local businesses to rampant criminal acts that went under-reported. Not to mention the serious pollution problem. People weren’t dumb or any different than they are now. But the drawbacks of the ‘burbs that we rail against now, were a small price to pay for getting away from these other things back then. Just like we sneer at the canned green beans we ate growing up, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that they weren’t a choice back then, they were often the only option.
We may like to put on some Arcade Fire and feel empowered as we rebel against our suburban upbringing, but really this current rejection of the suburbs and the move back to the city is really less about changing preferences than changing environments, and cities are once again good – and some would argue better – environments to live in for the first time in 150 years or so.
“this current rejection of the suburbs and the move back to the city is really less about changing preferences than changing environments, and cities are once again good – and some would argue better – environments to live in for the first time in 150 years or so.”
This is a great point. I definitely have been someone who sneers at the previous generation’s adoption of the suburban-sprawl model. Yet, when I was a kid, the current crop of intown neighborhoods full of walkable, family-friendly amenities didn’t exist (at least not in their current form) — so you’re right, there wasn’t a choice. The metro Atlanta environments that could be considered “liveable” by middle class standards existed almost exclusively in the suburbs.
Nonetheless, I’ll continue to sneer at the subsidies, zoning regulations, prejudices and more that made the suburban model the only livable choice for so long. But I can’t fault the average working people (like my parents) who moved where they did.
I’ll adamantly disagree with you, though, on this point: “drawbacks of the ‘burbs that we rail against now, were a small price to pay for getting away from these other things.” The price of suburban blandness might’ve seemed small in the day-to-day life of suburbanite. But there is nothing “small” about the price we all pay for the loss of un-built land area to sprawl. The damage to our native plant and animal species and their habitats in north Georgia is incalculable. The loss of ecosystems and agricultural land to suburban development is well worth a regular sneer.
On another level, there were other downsides to the suburbs of “back then”, especially on the social level. Like dysfunctional families (credits to Chekov or was it Tolstoy?), all suburbs were dysfunctional in their own way. Even though the suburb I grew up in was considered quite nice and had a good high school with mostly college-bound kids, almost no one stayed after high school or came back later. Something that’s always impressed me about Decatur is how many natives I meet who are incredibly loyal to DHS, the city, and the community. I could see my kids settling here when they are adults and I wouldn’t consider it a failure or lack of imagination or fear of the outside world.
I think another aspect to people moving back into the city is traffic. People start to wonder why do I want to waste two hours of my life every workday in traffic? Is there another way. And people started moving back in. Things got nicer, and more people moved in (i.e. gentrification). I wonder if this trend will start falling off as we continue to move toward a telecommuting world. There won’t be the push to be close to ‘work’ and avoid the traffic.
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