Culture : Space

On the Radar: Upcoming Documentary on Gentrification in Atlantic

Atlanta native and filmmaker King Williams is producing a documentary on gentrification in Atlanta, GA.  His kickstarter campaign was successful so keep an eye out for the upcoming film.

Desciption from the film's website:

"The Atlanta Way is an in-depth analysis of how Atlanta’s relationship with gentrification has been a byproduct of decades of clandestine backroom dealings, oblique public relations campaigns & the treatment of its growing underclass.

Focusing on investment and profit over outright defiant opposition, Atlanta positioned itself to be an outlier amongst other southern cities. This would be no more evident in its development of public housing, airport, highways, suburbs and the centennial Olympic games.

Atlanta is the first city in the US to open its doors to public housing and the first to successfully close all of its public housing as well. The Atlanta Housing Authority, utilizing a series of revolutionary as well as controversial programs aimed at curbing an even more controversial system of public housing projects."

 

 

 

The Future of Housing, Inequality and Wealth

Richard Florida's examination of a recent report by the Demand Institute highlights the geographic impact of the projected housing market and inequality. 

An excerpt:

"The ten percent of communities at the very top of the spectrum account for more than half (52 percent) of the nation's housing value – nearly $4.4 trillion in real estate assets. Despite the recession, these communities have experienced a 73 percent growth in housing value since 2000. Between 2000 and 2012, the group of cities in the top 10 percent also experienced 51 percent of the increase in income and 49 percent of the employment opportunities.

At the other end of the spectrum are the cities and towns where housing is worth far less and continues to be a far weaker investment. The bottom 40 percent of the report's sample accounted for a mere 8 percent of the total housing wealth. The bottom 40 percent of communities have seen just 9 percent of the increase in income and 9 percent of the growth in employment opportunities from 2000 to 2012."

You can read his entire post on the Atlantic Cities website here.

Iconic TV Homes

Photo: "Brady Bunch" Interior

Photo:  "Full House" Exterior

Photo: "Cosby Show" Exterior

Marketplace.org published an online quiz to test your knowledge of houses in pop culture.  The quiz features memorable homes from TV shows such as the "Brady Bunch" and "Full House."  I scored 9 out of 9 (although I guessed for the last two!). 

Zillow also published a bird's eye view of famous TV homes. 

What does it mean that I can easily recognize these homes? Does it matter?  How have these images shaped my beliefs about what is means to own a home?

I am thinking about the housing crisis and homeownership as one of the central features of the American Dream. One promising research direction is the construction of the American Dream through representations of the domestic sphere and the “good life” on TV. I want to explore the ways cultural and social differences (e.g., class, race and ethnicity, sexualty, gender) are communicated and negotiated in TV representations of spatial domesticity. 

 

Interesting reads

Sheldon and Leonard's apartment from the Big Bang Theory

Credit: www.cbs.com

 

Bankrate.com:  What 6 TV homes would cost in real life. By Dana Dratch

Slate:  Are Artists to Blame for Gentrification? By Ben Davis

Maps: Poverty and Race in the US

 

 

 

The Urban Institute created a mapping tool that tracks poverty and racial segregation using detailed Census data for every metro area in the US from 1980-2010.  The above maps represent Washington, DC in 1980 and 2010.  The maps provide visual evidence of the effects of gentrification in the metro area, especially comparing the urban center versus the suburbs.

Tree coverage and inequality in Washington, D.C.

Source: Ted Mellnik and Annie Gowen/The Washington Post.

 

The above chart from the Washington Post article "Tree canopy’s density indicates wealth of D.C. neighborhoods" attempts to illustrate a correlation between tree coverage and income in D.C.  In many ways this article states the obvious--wealthier neighborhoods tend to have more trees. The authors quote environmentalists' arguments about the benefits of trees and briefly mention real estate advantages.  However, I think this issue deserves deeper explanation.  This is an interesting research topic. Does tree coverage matter?

Interesting Reads

From Atlantic Cities:

One of America's Oldest Shopping Malls Converts to Micro-Apartments

What Is It Exactly That Makes Big Cities Vote Democratic?

New York's 'Affordable Housing' Isn't Always Affordable

San Francisco Chronicle:

Gentrification no longer a dirty word

New York Times:

Born to Wait

Jane Jacob's Vision and Gentrification

Interesting post from the New Republic:

The Real Problem with Gentrification: A phenomenon that revived cities can also make them monotonous

By Inga Saffron

Excerpt:

"It turns out that the old complaint against gentrification, that it drives out minorities, is far too simplistic. Instead, we should be worrying about a different concern: It hasn’t built the diversity that Jacobsian urbanists envisioned, and that cities need."

 

Americans Still Desire More Space

Source: Business Week.  Death of the McMansion Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

 

McMansions may not be as popular after the Great Recession of 2008, but Americans still want larger homes.  The National Association of Home Builders recently released their nationwide 2011 survey "What Home Buyers Really Want."  NAHB surveys new and potential homebuyers preferences for "home type and size, room layout and design, kitchen and baths, windows and doors, accessibility and outdoor features, electronics and technology in the home, energy efficiency, choosing a community, and trade-offs buyers are willing to make."  

Thank you to The Urban Land Institute for providing an overall summary of the data. 

Some interesting findings: 

1) The average new single-family house is now over 2,500 sq. ft. and continuing to trend larger.

2) This trend reflects the preferences of higher-income families that can afford large downpayments and financing in a tight mortgage market.

3) According to the NAHB most buyers aspire to own a home with a median of 2,226 sq. ft.

4) The majority of people surveyed want 3 to 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. 

5) Most interesting:  apparently 6 of 10 people surveyed would go without a living room.

 

Residential Segregation

Source:  Mandi Woodruff for BusinessInsider.com

 

While revising the final chapter of my dissertation I came across some interesting data on income segregation by the Pew Research Center.  Although Pew's research covers the entire United States (see 2012 report, "The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income") for this post I will focus on Washington, DC (where I currently reside).

The above map represents the Pew's Residential Income Segregation Index (RISI) for Washington, DC.  RISI is calculated by adding the rate of lower-income households living in a majority lower-income tract and the rate of upper-income households living in a majority upper-income tract. Red represents lower income tracts and blue higher income tracts.  Washington's score is 47 (the maximum score is 200) in comparison to the highest scoring metro areas, Houston and Dallas that have a RISI score of 61 and 60, respectively. Between 1980 and 2010, the Washington DC metro area population increased 78%, but the RISI scored only increased by 4. 

The reports states that "the typical upper-income household is more likely to live alongside other upper-income households, more than two-thirds of the neighbors of the typical upper-income household in 2010 were either middle income or lower-income households."  Although Pew did not report detailed data on the DC metro area, further research on gentrification in the District in comparison to the surrounding area may explain why the DC metro area has a relatively low RISI score. 

It is worth noting that residential segregation by race is still more prevalent than income.  The report states that "[i]n 2010, 42% of blacks lived in a census tract that was majority black, compared with 28% of low-income households living in a majority low-income tract and 18% of upper-income households living in a majority upper-income tract."  This is still the case in the DC metro area. Yale Professor Bill Rankin's map illustrates the point:

 

Source:  Radical Cartography Project