Christopher Leinberger is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of practice in urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.
Now there is a set of credentials which lies somewhere between impressive and intimidating.
Given that on your letterhead, you can write an article which the New York Times which will run above the fold on the op ed page, with a little art sketch adorning it.
Professor, senior fellow, Leinberger has analyzed some statistics, which makes his invocations unassailable. He looked at the Zillow real estate database, so he has some big numbers, and big numbers can never be wrong, or misinterpreted.
And what did he learn? He learned the collapse of the mortgage system was not caused by the avarice and shenanigans of brokers who used bogus, immoral, wildly doomed-to-fail mortgages to back stocks which were sold as can't fail because the most reliable, most vetted, surest bet things in the world are mortgages, which people will always pay because their homes are the things they value most in life--home and hearth.
Nope, the reason the mortgage system collapsed is the rise in appeal of the inner city, places which mean people do not need cars, can walk out of their townhouses and shop and walk to the theater, the museum the shopping they like.
So outer suburbs are bad. McMansions, with too many rooms, too much space, to much land between houses which tend to isolate rather than foster communities, are unattractive, nasty places to live and will inevitably be abandoned and decay, like Tara from Gone with the Wind, which is actually the name of a McMansion development in Potomac, Maryland, the fantasy upon which those tracks of large homes were built.
Now, I love New York City, personally. I loved the neighborhoods, where you walk along the sidewalks and everything is at street level: newspaper stores, laundry, grocery stores. You can buy shoes, get them repaired, and everything within walking distance. Or, you can jump down into a subway. If I could afford it, I'd still love to live in New York City or a place with all those characteristics.
But I would not try to argue that my personal preferences are confirmed as the way things should be for my countrymen based on my "analysis," of "data."
Actually, there are things about living in New York City and any like urban environment I found difficult: There was, eventually, a claustrophic feeling. I didn't spend much time in my apartment, but eventually, I started paging through L.L. Bean catalogues for images of country life. Shopping was restricted to what you could carry, groceries limited to what would fit in a roller crate. Buying furniture or any bulky items was a problem, but you don't do that all that often.
There is much to recommend urban life, and clearly New York City is better for the environment than living in suburbs, with the damage done by cars, the energy required to heat and cool large homes, the use of water and pesticides for lawns and gardens.
But there are trade offs, and not everyone, especially parents with small children, are willing to make them. City children have to be taught to stop running at the corner so they cannot be kidnapped when they turn out of sight.
There is much to recommend urban life, and clearly New York City is better for the environment than living in suburbs, with the damage done by cars, the energy required to heat and cool large homes, the use of water and pesticides for lawns and gardens.
But there are trade offs, and not everyone, especially parents with small children, are willing to make them. City children have to be taught to stop running at the corner so they cannot be kidnapped when they turn out of sight.
I would love to see more city options emerge. I'd love to see Portsmouth, New Hampshire become a small Upper West Side, and Portland another Brooklyn. Personally, I'd love to see that. But I very much doubt I can read the minds of my countrymen based on the Zillow real estate database, and I doubt Professor Leinberger can either.
You see this sort of "analysis" and "thinking" done by most politicians and many "commentators." They begin with their own likes and dislikes and find "data" and numbers, the bigger the better to "prove" what they like is the best for everyone.
I am not a Brookings Institution fellow, but I got to believe that thousands of local bankers consumed with ambition, burning with avarice, had something to do with the housing mortgage crash, as they pushed loans on people who could not afford them, telling those gullible, eager to believe folks that yes, this part of the American dream can be theirs; it's all so simple, just move into this dream house. I'm a banker for Pete's sake. Would I lie to you?
I don't know, but I find that scenario easier to believe than the scenario painted by Professor Leinberger, that of wealthy one percenters driving through Potomac, Maryland and McLean, Virginia, shaking their heads a the sight of those stone mason walls, those sweeping driveways and saying to themselves--nope, I'd rather live in Logan Circle, in downtown Washington, DC, with its horrific, dysfunctional city government, its constantly changing neighborhoods, which only a few years ago were so crime ridden and violent nobody wanted to walk there, much less live there, which were so forbidding restaurants could not survive there.
It's true more and more of Washington, DC has gentrified, but for how long is anyone's guess. Cities may be drawing more affluent people back in as they "downsize" once their children have grown up and moved away, but, actually, I would not be at all surprised to learn most boomers are staying put in their empty homes, because they cannot sell them for anything close to what they would need to sell them for, in order to pay for pricey urban homes. And the boomers, especially the older ones, often find any change difficult, so the suburbs may be senescent and senescing, but I bet they are not going to wither into ghost towns, as Professor Leinberger hopes.
The sad fact is, many inner cities are still decaying--just look at Detroit--and parts of Washington, DC have never recovered from the riots of 1968. I wish it weren't true. I wish those lovely brownstones in Bedford Styvestant, Brooklyn were being brought back to life; I wish the Grand Concourse in the Bronx was being rejuvenated. But no, despite the wishes of urban planners, urban blight persists. Baltimore sinks deeper and until government and policy and basic institutions like schools, police, media and banks and industrial base can actually find adequate people to make rational decisions, that city will never come back.
There may be ghost towns of unsold suburban homes in Arizona or in Ireland, but the homes of aging boomers will remain occupied until they die, I would bet. And I suspect my bet, based on no data is just as likely to be correct, as Dr. Leinberger's guess, who based his explanations on his holy scripture, the Zillow data.
This is the sort of "analysis" you hear from Rush Limbaugh every day. It's more sophisticated, and the numbers are examined with greater care, but it amounts to the same thing in the end: The expert, the opinionator, arrives at his conclusion not because a dispassionate observation leads him to question, hmm, why do you suppose sales around Logan Circle were better than sales in Potomac the last year? It's got to be people are finally coming around to the value of inner cities, and at this point in the lives of our aging population, the inner cities serve their needs better. They have finally awakened to the wisdom of what I've believed and preached all these years.
Or not. Actually, not.
I am not a Brookings Institution fellow, but I got to believe that thousands of local bankers consumed with ambition, burning with avarice, had something to do with the housing mortgage crash, as they pushed loans on people who could not afford them, telling those gullible, eager to believe folks that yes, this part of the American dream can be theirs; it's all so simple, just move into this dream house. I'm a banker for Pete's sake. Would I lie to you?
I don't know, but I find that scenario easier to believe than the scenario painted by Professor Leinberger, that of wealthy one percenters driving through Potomac, Maryland and McLean, Virginia, shaking their heads a the sight of those stone mason walls, those sweeping driveways and saying to themselves--nope, I'd rather live in Logan Circle, in downtown Washington, DC, with its horrific, dysfunctional city government, its constantly changing neighborhoods, which only a few years ago were so crime ridden and violent nobody wanted to walk there, much less live there, which were so forbidding restaurants could not survive there.
It's true more and more of Washington, DC has gentrified, but for how long is anyone's guess. Cities may be drawing more affluent people back in as they "downsize" once their children have grown up and moved away, but, actually, I would not be at all surprised to learn most boomers are staying put in their empty homes, because they cannot sell them for anything close to what they would need to sell them for, in order to pay for pricey urban homes. And the boomers, especially the older ones, often find any change difficult, so the suburbs may be senescent and senescing, but I bet they are not going to wither into ghost towns, as Professor Leinberger hopes.
The sad fact is, many inner cities are still decaying--just look at Detroit--and parts of Washington, DC have never recovered from the riots of 1968. I wish it weren't true. I wish those lovely brownstones in Bedford Styvestant, Brooklyn were being brought back to life; I wish the Grand Concourse in the Bronx was being rejuvenated. But no, despite the wishes of urban planners, urban blight persists. Baltimore sinks deeper and until government and policy and basic institutions like schools, police, media and banks and industrial base can actually find adequate people to make rational decisions, that city will never come back.
There may be ghost towns of unsold suburban homes in Arizona or in Ireland, but the homes of aging boomers will remain occupied until they die, I would bet. And I suspect my bet, based on no data is just as likely to be correct, as Dr. Leinberger's guess, who based his explanations on his holy scripture, the Zillow data.
This is the sort of "analysis" you hear from Rush Limbaugh every day. It's more sophisticated, and the numbers are examined with greater care, but it amounts to the same thing in the end: The expert, the opinionator, arrives at his conclusion not because a dispassionate observation leads him to question, hmm, why do you suppose sales around Logan Circle were better than sales in Potomac the last year? It's got to be people are finally coming around to the value of inner cities, and at this point in the lives of our aging population, the inner cities serve their needs better. They have finally awakened to the wisdom of what I've believed and preached all these years.
Or not. Actually, not.
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