Christopher Leinberger

Walkability in suburbs, cities

Metropolitan Land Strategist & Developer, Apr 25, 11.

Tagged with cities, suburbs, walkable urbanism, people

There is an old joke among demographers (a group well known for their hilarity) about a drunk who loses his car keys at the front door of a house that has no porch light. After he realizes his loss, he goes to the nearest street light but well away from the front door to look for them. When asked why he wasn’t looking where he lost the keys, he replied, “This is where the light is.”

Looking “where the light is” is the bane of demographic analysis. This explains the great excitement of pro-suburban analysts like Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox, and my Brookings colleague Rob Lang about the less than stellar growth of core cities during the past decade. As Kotkin and Cox recently wrote:

“During the 2000s, the census shows, just 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than a million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs.”

Unfortunately, the census shines the light on the terms “city” and “suburb”—neither of which are the keys to understanding today’s built environment.

Core cities are comprised of pedestrian-oriented urban places, how Jerry Seinfeld lived, but they also include auto-centric suburban places, like the San Fernando Valley in the city of Los Angeles or the Palisades in the District of Columbia. Likewise, the suburbs of those core cities include classic subdivisions and McMansions, like the home of Tony Soprano, but they also include booming places like Old Town Pasadena, Reston Town Center near Dulles Airport outside D.C., and revitalized Jersey City and Hoboken, NJ, on the other side of the Hudson River from Manhattan.

The issue is where are walkable urban places being built, and they are being built in both central cities and the suburbs surrounding them…

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Source: The New Republic, April 20, 2011

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