A New Formula for Neighborhood Livability
Neighborhood Urban Design Metrics 2.0
Research shows that long-term health and wealth outcomes are directly correlated with the neighborhood in which a child grows up. Specifically, the area within a half-mile of a child's home.
Background
Urban designers have a core set of metrics for measuring neighborhoods.
We use these metrics to evaluate a neighborhood's performance...
... and identify relevant precedents and performance targets for our projects.
But these metrics fail to help us understand a crucial aspect of our work:
Who actually lives in these neighborhoods?
Are we designing inclusive places?
We are proposing a new equation for evaluating the livability of a neighborhood.
Existing scholarship offers an array of neighborhood equity indicators with direct ties to urban design.
Many of these social equity indicators are available through Census datasets and are relatively simple to generate.
The result is a new set of urban design metrics for evaluating social equity at the neighborhood scale.
Why Social Metrics?
The history of American cities and urban development illustrates the importance of centering social equity metrics in all planning and urban design work.
We like to think of American history as a continuous march of progress toward greater freedom, greater equality, and greater justice... Residential integration declined steadily from 1880 to the mid-twentieth century, and it has mostly stalled since then.
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law
Our cities today are the direct result of explicit and implicit racist policies and practices that date back to the foundation of this country.
Throughout the United States, significant effort has been made by planners, designers, developers, and government officials to racially segregate neighborhoods.
This is true particularly in northern and western states, despite not having the same legacy of slavery and Jim Crow as the American South.
Right: 1916 flyer from St. Louis, MO encouraging voters to approve a measure that would block African-Americans from living on blocks made up of predominantly white residents.
In the selection of tenants… [we shall] not insofar as possible enforce the commingling of races, but shall insofar as possible maintain and preserve the same racial composition which exists in the neighborhood where a project is located.
San Francisco Housing Authority (1942)
Levittown, NY symbolized the dawn of the “American Dream” for many white families in the mid-20th Century.
While African-Americans were prevented from living in the town through government-sanctioned racial segregation and violent, citizen-led mobs.
Zoning proved an especially efficient tool for introducing and preserving segregation in cities throughout the country.
Right: Excerpt from the 1922 City of Atlanta Plan.
Explicitly racist policies would eventually be replaced with race-neutral ones, but the intent remained.
Right: the 1937 Home Owner's Loan Corporation Map of San Francisco, CA identified primarily non-white neighborhoods in red as areas that were too "high risk" for homebuyers to receive federally backed mortgages.
Housing developers and city planners relied on single-family residential zoning to preserve neighborhoods for middle-class white families.
African-Americans and other non-white residents were largely cut off from the home loan industry, preventing them from obtaining the mortgages necessary to purchase a single-family home in the developing suburbs.
Right: The master-planned Westlake development in Daly City, CA was one of the first post-WWII all-white residential developments in the United States.
Even when non-white buyers were able to secure financing, racially restrictive property deeds prevented developers and white homeowners from selling and re-selling homes to non-white buyers--ensuring the racial segregation of neighborhoods from one generation to the next.
Right: Levittown, NY was the first master-planned suburb, built primarily to house working class veterans and their families after World War II. Property deeds explicitly outlawed occupation by non-white residents.
Car-oriented, single-family residential suburbs made the case for highway expansions into our urban centers, wiping out fine-grained urban fabric and permanently fracturing non-white communities.
Right: The former Central Freeway running through the Hayes Valley neighborhood in San Francisco, CA
The impacts of these policies are both visible and invisible.
And they are passed down from one generation to the next. Disinvestment in place is quite literally a disinvestment in people.
Right: The Opportunity Atlas maps the average household income for adults who grew up as children in the census tracts shown. Red outlines illustrate areas of the neighborhood that were "redlined" during the middle of the 20th Century.
This history has laid the groundwork for massive inequities in cities and neighborhoods across the country.
This is the context in which all urban design projects operate within. It is imperative that designers understand this legacy and the potential impact of their work on perpetuating inequality.
Right: Timeline of racial planning and housing policy practices in the United States, beginning in 1910.
Six Case Study Neighborhoods
To test this new expanded suite of neighborhood metrics, we chose six case study neighborhoods to analyze and compare. Click through the slide show below to learn more about the case studies.
01 / 06
Database Approach
The dynamics of neighborhoods are constantly changing. A streamlined data analysis workflow will help designers measure neighborhoods quickly, and store the outputs in a larger database. This database will allow for a more efficient data visualization process, and the ability to track neighborhood changes over time.
01 / 05
Case Study Findings
Neighborhoods are complex and granular. And socialized metrics add a crucial layer of nuance that can directly influence design outcomes.
The case studies illustrate the value of analyzing density at the Census Block level.
And the importance of including socialized metrics in the existing conditions analysis.
Residential Population Density
San Francisco's Hayes Valley has a density of approximately 16,000 residents per square mile.
Residential Population Density
But these residents are not evenly distributed throughout the neighborhood.
Breaking the Census data down into a smaller grid reveals that the people per square mile ratio ranges from 8 over 24,000.
This is an important point to articulate to communities that are wary of seeing higher density development in their neighborhood.
Residential Population Density
Over in Mission Bay, the neighborhood density is closer to 7,000 people per square mile, though this number is continuing to increase as the neighborhood develops.
We can continue to track the density changes in Mission Bay through our centralized database.
10-Minute Walkshed
A "walkshed" is the portion of a neighborhood that is within a 10-minute walk.
As opposed to a simple buffer, this metric tells a more honest story about a neighborhood's walkability.
In Mission Bay, an elevated freeway, a heavy rail line, and a canal limit the total coverage of the walkshed originating from a transit stop.
A walkshed analysis helps identify any areas of relative isolation even within a "walkable" neighborhood.
10-Minute Walkshed
While in Portland's, Pearl District, the walkshed has a more even coverage across the entire neighborhood.
Percent of Residents Experiencing Rent Burden
Residents who spend more than 30% of their income on rent per month are considered "rent burdened".
In the Pearl District, virtually all of the neighborhood is experiencing elevated levels of rent-burden.
However, the boundaries between areas of higher and lower concentration of rent-burden are quite rigid.
Percent of Residents Experiencing Rent Burden
Meanwhile, in the Uptown and Grand Lake neighborhoods of Oakland, areas of relatively high and low concentrations of rent-burdened residents are far more mixed.
Percent of Residents Identifying as Black and/or Hispanic
And in the Grand Lake neighborhood, the grid method allows for clear illustration of how an elevated highway correlates with where higher concentrations of Black and Hispanic residents.
Percent of Residents Identifying as Black and/or Hispanic
Likewise in Cambridge's Kendall Square, high concentrations of Black and Hispanic residents are primarily clustered around two public housing developments.
Percent of Residents with Low-Wage Jobs
Approximately 18% of the workforce living in Kendall Square is low-wage. This is relatively close to the county's average of 19%.
However these residents are isolated in just a few locations--notably several MIT campus dorms and a public housing development.
Percent of Residents with Low-Wage Jobs
Of the workforce that lives within Hayes Valley, approximately 15% are low-wage earners. This is just below the county-wide average of 16%.
However, compared to Kendall Square, these workers are relatively distributed across the entire neighborhood.
Next Steps
- Continue gathering data for precedent and project neighborhoods
- Confirm suite of applications: ArcGIS Online vs. Tableau
- Establish script protocol for updating the database
