On this episode of Municipal Equation. This whole idea that, oh, we're gonna have to be downtown so that attract millennials, that that that I think is is a, is not a long term good strategy unless you want to every ten years flush out your your 35 year olds for 25 year olds. You know? I mean, it's sort of like, you know, some of the it's almost like the the old movie Logan's Run, you know, where you kill everybody over 30.

Hello?

Well, I think the question is what what I was really trying to do was to say, how do we build cities that actually work for people as opposed to thinking of cities as economic constructs or ways of reducing carbon footprints or aesthetics, all of which are important issues but really do not address and often contradict the needs of middle and working class families in particular. And so what we have in our core cities is a diminished population of middle class families and sort of, you know, in some areas wealthy people, in some areas poor people, a lot of young people who are there for a relatively brief period of time. But then, we really have ignored where the vast majority of the population lives, which is in low density cities and suburbs, and that population has been literally almost written out of existence in most urban planning and you know, how how often is there a urban pundit who has anything good to say about suburbia, except that maybe you should turn it into a city?

Well, the first thing is I think there is a there certainly is an attraction among younger people for cities, the vast, you know, urban dense cities. And, but and no more than 20% of millennials live in dense urban cities. And as they get older, all the evidence is that they begin to look for different kinds of environments. So my sense is that there really are, you know, there really should be a continuum where you, yes, you have a dense urban space, but recognize that as people get older, as they want to own a home, as they want to raise a family, as they want to send their kids to decent schools, that they want to have a less congested daily life, that most people, the vast majority for economic reasons and very often by preference, will look to live in more suburban locations. And that really should be the emphasis should be on those locations because that's where about 80% of the metropolitan population, you know, depends on where you live, lives. They live in suburban environments dominated by single family homes. Most people get around by car, and the densities are, you know, certainly not Manhattan like densities. Not that there isn't room for both, but what I think has happened is that in their passion to promote high density housing, large parts of the development community and certainly the urban planning academic world, really wants to have people live in very dense places. Now the downside of that is several. A density is much more expensive. So you're buying a high rise apartment about the cost is about five times what it is for a single family home or a townhouse. Second, families don't wanna live in apartments. I mean, overwhelming percentage of people with children, want to and usually do live in single family homes. This is one of the reasons why you have migration, let's say, from places that have declared war on the suburbs like California to places like North Carolina, why people leave New York and move to North Carolina, why, you know, what is the great attraction? Well you don't move from Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York to North Carolina because it's hipper and cooler, no offense it's not. And you're not moving there because of the great you know, urban life. Yes, there's nice urban life in North Carolina, but let's face it, it's not Manhattan. It's not even West Hollywood. But for most people, the choice comes particularly in your early thirties, which is where the millennials are now headed. Okay, I wanna own a house, I wanna have some space even if you don't have children, I wanna have a backyard for the dog, I wanna hang out, you know, the desire for high density, every every migration study, every survey that looks at this issue will find that people particularly as they get into their 30s vastly prefer a single family home. Now, if they could find a single family home or a townhouse in a greater neighborhood, that's terrific. The problem is that in some of the great urban neighborhoods, near where there's lots of stuff to walk to, they also tend to be very expensive. And if people say, well, what would be the ideal environment? Well, it'd be a nice house near a lot of things to do. Well, we have a name for these places. They're called Beverly Hills. There are even places like Montclair in New Jersey. You know, these are great places to live but they are very expensive. So the only way we really can deal with the issue of affordability is to construct more housing, you know, usually in the periphery or in areas that have been underdeveloped over time. And the question is then how do we do that? And certainly I would love to see the brainpower that is now being applied to pushing an agenda people don't want to adjusting an agenda that people more and more want. Now that doesn't mean there isn't a market for density, ten, fifteen, maybe 20% want to live in some degree of density, that's great, and you can accommodate that, but then what about the 75, eighty, eighty five, 90% of the population that want something else? Do we deny them so that, you know, planners, and and and certain developers can take advantage of of of this kind of environment to force people to live the ways that they fundamentally don't wanna live?

Well, I think there are all sorts of different things. One thing is pretty much common is the schools. You know, people move in large part for decent schools and that's gotta be pretty much common. If you don't have good schools, you know, you're going to have a very bifurcated population between poor people who have no choice and rich people who go to private school. I mean, that's what you have, let's say, in a city like Los Angeles to a large extent, certainly in New York as well. But if you take a look at what, you could do, I mean, many of these towns would do much better. For instance, if you have an old downtown, fix it up. Make it nice. Give people a place that they can go so they don't have to drive 20 miles to downtown Right. Or to a bigger city to do things. A lot of these towns were were old rural small towns before they became part of a of a metropolis. Well, take advantage of that. Build a little village environment. Make it better. You know, I know cities I've done this like in Naperville, Illinois. I mean, they're, here in Southern California in Orange and and Fullerton. That's something you could do. The other big thing is I think you really have to look increasingly at at at open space and recreational opportunities. You know, I think the days where we built communities around golf courses are sort of on the way out. And I think the future is gonna be communities built around, access to agriculture, certainly one. Another would be, to recreation, bike trails, parklands, places to hike. If you're building new communities, you really wanna try to work those in. So those are definitely things you can do. And then, you know, on the retail side, you gotta be thinking about how retail is going to look as more and more business moves to, to the online. You know, what kind of retail is going to work? What kind of retail experience is going to work? And I think that's going to be something that's that towns and cities and neighborhoods are gonna have to look at.

Well, I think it's gotta be a partnership between, you know, the government structures, hopefully, the local government structures. I'm I'm very concerned with it with the tendency for HUD and EPA, and here in the state of California, our state government, to tell every locality, well you've got to look the way we think you should look, not how you want to look. I mean I think local choice is sort of a critical component of this. The private sector has got to be important, but the private sector has to, you know, and look there are people in the private sector, I'll give you an example, if you go to the Bay Area and they have the Bay Area plan imposed by an unelected board basically which says okay, we're going to do all future development in the San Francisco Bay Area at 4% of the land mass. Well if you're sitting on some of that 4% you're saying, hey, I like this, but what that does in terms of prices and what that does in terms of options particularly for middle and working class families is pretty disastrous. I mean, that's why you have out migration even today, domestic out migration from places like Silicon Valley in the midst of an enormous boom, and we've never seen anything like that before.

Well, I one is it is a terrible mistake for cities to think that these millennials who may come to them when they're 25 are gonna be there when they're 35. If you don't fix the schools and you don't have housing that they're gonna wanna live in, they're not gonna stay, and we've already stated that all the research will show you that as people go in their thirties, they leave cities and, you know, it depends. If you're a city like I think some of the ones in North Carolina where you can live in the part of Charlotte or Raleigh with, you know, really nice single family homes, you know, close to the downtown, if the schools are decent, those places will do great. But this whole idea that, oh, we're gonna have to be downtown so that attract millennials, that that that I think is is a, is not a long term good strategy unless you want to every ten years flush out your your 35 year olds for 25 year olds, you know. I mean, it's sort of like, look, you know, some of the it's almost like the old movie Logan's Run, you know, where you kill everybody over 30. You know, in many cases what we see is that companies will go down those cases which are very publicized. The company goes downtown, but usually downsizes at the same time and employs, you know, far fewer people than they did, in the past. When we take a look at where jobs are actually going, the vast majority, are in suburbs, that's where the growth is predominantly. It's just that we have a mass media which, you know, basically has become more concentrated in smaller and smaller groups of journalists, many of whom are in their twenties, you know, who have not reached the point where they're ever you know, where they're gonna have a family or they're going to have or or they're gonna buy a house, and they write about a world that's convenient for them to walk to from the newspaper office. I mean, I'm that cynical. I you know, it's it's so like, for instance, I'll give you an example. We looked at Downtown Los Angeles, it had an increase of about 5,000 millennials since 2000. Okay, that's nice. The western part of the Inland Empire, San Bernardino Riverside, the part closest to LA, is about an increase of 150,000 millennials. And yet those 150,000 millennials might as well not exist. We call them hidden millennials. So every millennial who's got a, you know, a guy with a goatee and a and hipster hat, you know, you know, wearing a t shirt, working on on on an app in a in a coffee shop, that is the archetype that the media keeps going back to, but it doesn't, a, reflect the vast majority of millennials and certainly won't reflect how they live when they're in their thirties and forties. Now when they go to the suburbs, which I think is pretty much inevitable and and is already happening, they're not gonna be exactly the same as their parents. I mean, they're gonna be similar, but they're gonna be different. They're probably gonna wanna have better restaurants. They're probably gonna enjoy the fact that actually immigrants are the are the first ones to run to the suburbs and particularly in in the South where you don't have histories of large Latino and Asian communities in the city for anyone to even go to. You know, I mean, I know when I was in Nashville, for instance, all the the ethnic neighborhoods were on the outskirts of the city, certainly not anywhere near the city core. And of course, if you know, if you want good Indian food in in in Houston, you go to Sugar Land. If you want good Vietnamese food in Washington, you go out to to Fairfax County. I mean, other words, the suburbs will change. They will have more amenities. They will be, they will be more oriented towards, I think, like, you know, a revised either a town center or a revised main street. When you actually look at them, they don't want less space. They want they by by about, you know, by far the preference is more space than what they have now. I mean, you know, I mean literally there is like a mythology that keeps getting pushed which really reflects in my view the world view of a relatively small, highly articulate, highly well educated group because let's face it, who can go who's gonna live in San Francisco or New York unless daddy's paying the rent? I mean, you know, when you when I have friends whose son's going to bolt hole at Berkeley and, you know, one bedroom apartment is $4,000. Sure. I mean, you know, I mean, you know, that that money that money would buy you, you know, what, the mortgage of three houses in in Charlotte? Right. Right. And so unless you're one of these people, like, you know, at the very high end of the food chain like MIT or or, you know, somebody with a with a, you know, very advanced degree and is gonna be an investment banker, that person, you know, could conceivably stay in the in the urban core, but the vast majority are not. And I said, again, that's why I called it for the rest of us. I mean, and and that's, you know, that's for and really not us as in me because being, you know, I'm at an age where I was able to buy into the real estate market in Southern California in 1980 and and been able to ride that tide, but damn hard for somebody who's 35 to do that unless they rob the bank.

Well, the impetus, interestingly enough, started in probably the best run dense city in the world, which is Singapore where I was teaching, And I began to realize that there was a tremendous divergence in how some of the planners and business people viewed Singapore thinking, well, we want a denser, we want more people to come, we want to take a city of 5,000,000, make a city of 7,000,000. Right. And then when I would talk to students or I talk to, you know, just, you know, regular people, they said, well, we don't want this. It's crowded enough. You know, we want something more, if you will, homey or, you know, they they talk about in Singapore the Kampong spirit, which is a traditional Malay village. I mean, now, some of that's romantic, but what I realized is that when you have this kind of high density and super high end economy, one of the things that happens is people stop having children because they don't have the space is expensive and they're working, you know, ridiculously hot, long hours and they simply just don't have kids. And I think, you know, in the advanced industrial world, in the high income countries, this is a time bomb, because, you know, obviously what are you going to do when you have all these old people and not a lot of young people. You take Japan, a classic case, you know, you have, by 2050, you'll have more people with children with, you'll have more people 80 than children 15. Now what kind of society are we talking about? I don't think that's gonna be the most innovative vital society in history. And so that that really a lot of it came from Asia. Then I I spent a lot of time visiting developing city countries, you know, like Mexico City, which is one of my favorite cities, or or Mumbai, or, Delhi, or, you know, I've been in these places, and I don't somehow see that this is the model of how we think humanity should proceed. You know, they're they're not really very pleasant, and they're not getting any more pleasant either. And and then, you know, and then I I started looking into the whole, you know, urban debate here and I just found that, you know, the urban, you know, the academic planning, high end development world is basically hostile to how the vast majority of Americans can afford to live or want to live. And I said, well somebody's gotta speak out for everybody else. And so I guess it ended up being me. I mean, there are others who have who have done great work in this area. Wendell Cox, Bob Brujeman, are two in particular. Solly Angel.

Well, I think first of all, again, if you have a downtown, take advantage of it as kind of a hook for your whole community, a a community space. I think that's very important. The I think you have to look at your park structure. I'm I'm a big fan of linear parks, which are good for wildlife and, you know, can extend into a large area. And I know there are some very elaborate parks, being developed in North Carolina. And I think that that and then you've got to look at how do you maintain the schools because you're not going to get families if the schools aren't good. And then in terms of economic development, I think you have to look at bringing in, you know, obviously you want to bring in businesses, but do you really want to foster locally based businesses? Because one huge advantage that these communities might have and we've seen it in places like Irvine here in Southern California is that you bring people in who are now, you know, in their early thirties thinking about starting a business, maybe are self employed working at home And that population I think is very, very critical to, to building sort of the sustainable economy. You know, the reality is that the vast majority of your 30 workforce is going to be in suburbia. And if you could if you could sort of convince people that this is a good place to be, and I was running into this in Massachusetts and in Waltham outside Boston, you know, this the the vast majority of tech is still in suburbia you by far and and more and more of business services. It's a very high profile stuff sometimes goes into, let's say, Downtown Chicago, but the the rest of Chicago the city of Chicago is is hemorrhaging jobs. And so I think that there's a opportunity for these suburban communities to become, as I like to look at them as sort of like more like villages, like, you know, something more self contained. Certainly in terms of amenities, certainly in terms of restaurants, certainly in terms of cultural events and schools and to a large extent, in terms of employment. If you look at the employment sheds of almost every major metropolitan area in The United States, the vast majority of jobs do not exist in the urban core. So where can we learn a little bit more about your work? And and also, could you maybe give us a taste of your next project and what that might be? Well, I'm not sure. My wife said no no no no more books this year. So I'm I'm you know, because books are, you know, they're kind of a big drain. Mhmm. And I've done nine of them already. But, right now, the projects I'm working on, one is on transit. Are there ways that we can use new technologies to provide a better transit system? So I think those are some of the steps that you that that, that that I'm hoping to take. You know, I'm doing that. I'm also doing a project on millennial housing. I'm working on a whole series of things about the cities in Texas, which is really where the urban growth is, doing some work on the revitalization of the heartland economy. So a lot of different projects. And I'm working on I've just finished a paper, which should be out in the next few months, about the importance of local government and why we need to allow decisions to, wherever possible, come from the bottom up, not the top down. This is one of the worst things that's happening in America today is the federal government, in some cases state governments, sort of contravening local, you know, local taste. You know, it's so funny to me, so many progressives who, you know, always say, well, we want to have local food and local culture and, you know, and local this, local that, but your community has to be the way somebody in Sacramento or somebody in in in in Raleigh says you have to be. You know what I mean? I mean, this there's a contradiction there. And I think that there is a very strong case and it doesn't you don't have to be a conservative. You can certainly there's a part of liberalism that talks about the laboratories of democracy, about local governments being able to experiment. Let them experiment. You know, if it works, it works. If Portland decides that they don't wanna have, you know, cars in their downtown, let them try it. And maybe they'll like it, maybe they won't, maybe another community will look at it and say, hey, I don't want to do that, and maybe another community will say, hey, this is exactly what we want. I think we've sort of we're choking the vitality of American democracy, which de Tocqueville talked about, by forcing solutions of any kind. You know, if, you know, if the city of Charlotte wants to be more progressive, if you want to use that term, on social issues, let them be it. You know, within the context of some basic civil rights protections, I think we should allow, you know, more sort of self organizing communities, you know, going from the, you know, from the from the county to the town to to the neighborhood to the family and and empowering them. This idea of running everything from the top and that a bunch of people in Washington or in the state capitol, bureaucracy know how everybody should live, I think is is a contravening of of American democracy and what it means.

Well, I think the first thing is you gotta figure out what's appropriate, what's not. What's what, you know, what level of decision making should be done at the local level. There are clearly things where you need a larger, unit. I'm a big fan of the idea of what we call adhocracy, which Al Toffler talked about. I mean, we should look at flexible arrangements that actually make sense as opposed to concentrating power in, let's say, the state capital where, you know, the needs of Charlotte and Raleigh and Chapel Hill and Wilmington may be very different or Asheville or host of small communities. They they have different needs. They have different preferences. You know, somehow we've forgotten the idea that this is supposed to be a self governing country, and, you know, we shouldn't be having these type of intense national debates about local issues. As much as possible, we should allow for, you know, local government and and local entities to sort of shape themselves and, you know, people will take a look and people, let's say, would look at Carmel, Indiana as a success. Other cities go, they say, hey, we're gonna try that. But the problem is, like, our politics, our planning is becoming increasingly not nationalized and it's not for the better. Well, Joel Cotton, any final words for our listeners? Well, I think the main thing I would really stress is I would really stress the idea that, you know, North Carolina in particular is a, you know, attracting a lot of migration, considerable number of immigration. And rather than trying to force people to live in the ways that they had to live in their old communities, give them the opportunity to live a better quality of life. And that means not just, you know, density but and providing that option but providing options for families, which are predominantly suburban and and, and single family home and and to do that in a way that is more sustainable, more, you know, requires maybe a little less driving, and is predominantly more and more, oriented towards people working at home or people working near home.