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?

Post-Industrial Metro Areas

The Atlantic Cities posted "America's Most Post-Industrial Metros" listing the top 20 metro areas with populations over 1 million that score highest on the ratio of services to goods in America's continuing transition to a post-industrial economy. 

The overall ratio of services to goods for the U.S. economy is approximately 3 to 1. The post-industrial economy is most prevalent in the Northeast corridor (Boston to Washington, DC).  The Washington metro area is the highest with a ratio of 11.17. The New York metro follows with a ratio of 9.86.  Interestingly, the Miami metro area follows with a ratio of 7.75. 

The DC and NYC metro areas have a higher concentration of professionals, but I would guess that Miami has a higher ratio of service jobs in comparison to professional jobs.  It would be interesting to compare income levels with the services to goods ratio to also consider rising inequality in post-industrial metro areas.

Suburban Poverty

Sprawling and struggling: Poverty hits America's suburbs by Allison Linn

From NBC News -- "Poverty in Plain Sight" series:

"The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.

'I think we have an outdated perception of where poverty is and who it is affecting,' said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the research. 'We tend to think of it as a very urban and a very rural phenomenon, but it is increasingly suburban.'"

The post features a mother and daughter in Connecticut--however, I am interested in the statistics for the Washington, D.C. area.  I suspect that this is happening in the suburbs of the DC Metro area despite local news stories commending the area economy and low unemployment rate.

 

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.