Let’s start with this interesting item from Ananova, which I bookmarked several months ago:

Help for mummys’ boys

The Italian government is handing out grants to help mummys’ boys leave home.

The move comes after economists warned almost 60% of young adult Italians stayed at home and were not marrying, having children or building up homes of their own.

Economy Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa says part of a two billion euro provision in the 2008 state budget will be used to help young people move out of family homes.

He said: “Let’s get these big babies out of the home. We’re encouraging young people to leave home.

“If they don’t, they just stay with their parents, they don’t get married and they don’t become independent. This is an important idea.”

Many young people say they cannot afford to move out of home so the government has announced plans to make more affordable accommodation available and build more public housing.

EU figures show that 56% of 25 to 29 year-olds still live with their parents in Italy, compared to 21% of Germans and just five per cent of Swedes.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2540354.html?menu=

The relevance this has for all cities/ societies, it seems to me, is that issues around housing affordability have social consequences that go beyond the usual markers of economic disparity in cities. From the statistics, the Swedes are coming out way ahead of the game, with only 5% of Swedes aged 25 to 29 years old living at home with their parents. The Swedes are known, of course, for their advanced social programs, including solutions around housing affordability. This closes the gap in economic disparity, which in turn lets that society reap competitive rewards and capture innovation gains that elude other societies. Grown children living with their parents is clearly a step backwards, whereas independence at young adulthood (just before middle age, in fact) is an indicator of social strength and resilience.

Underscoring this idea is an article in yesterday’s Globe & Mail by Richard Florida, called Pity the tri-city Toronto. (The article continues on page 2 here.) Florida describes the economic divide that fractures American cities in particular, and that data indicate that Toronto is in danger of breaking apart along similar lines. To date, Canada, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries had managed to …well, manage their economic disparities effectively, a trait that gave these countries an edge.

A new study by the University of Toronto’s J. David Hulchanski of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto Neighbourhoods, 1970-2000, however, sends a warning signal that things could go sideways here. Florida sees this in a “big picture” frame, historically linked to previous periods of social and economic innovation and upheaval (eg., the Industrial Revolution). As he writes on page 2:

We need to understand the tremendous economic and social polarization produced by the shift to a global creative economy. The same things happened with the Industrial Revolution. It took the leading nations of the world 50 or more years to understand it – a period punctuated by depression, epic class struggles, and two world wars – and finally for progressive leaders to enact new deals that would spread the productive capacity of the industrial engine and allow working people to benefit from the productivity improvements their work helped create.

It’s time to wake up and act on these striking new realities. The key task of our time is to build new institutions to spread the gains of the creative economy. If not, it will continue to concentrate those gains geographically and socially.

This is Toronto’s and Canada’s great opportunity. It’s also a major part of the reason why I moved to Toronto. Absent a major miracle, the level of economic and social polarization is so deep in the United States that it may well prohibit the kind of concerted action required to overcome that class divide and build a more cohesive and shared creative economy.

In my view there are at best three economies worldwide that have the social capacity to navigate and lead in this change. Canada is one, Australia another, the Scandinavian nations still another. And that leadership, given the absence of awareness of these issues at the national level, will have to come from the major cities in these nations.

In a sense, I’d argue that big kids living at home with their parents is another indicator of badly managed, possibly crippling socio-economic disparity. It’s not just a case, simply, of “mummy’s boys,” but also of lost horizons, nowhere to go, and most especially: an inability to afford to move out to be independent. What a waste!

***

That ends my commentary on this issue, but since Globe & Mail articles tend to disappear off the web quite quickly, I’ll append a chunk of the article from page 1 for context (and see also Florida’s blog entry on this topic). In the Globe & Mail, he introduces the topic as follows:

For decades we’ve heard that new transport and communication technologies – from the street car to the Internet – would make geography and place irrelevant. We could all spread out and locate wherever we liked. The suburbs would boom, edge cities would predominate and the urban core would fade away into irrelevance. Some told us that the future of the centre of cities was to become little more than a “sandbox” or “reservation” – a holding pen for the urban poor.

It turns out that these prognostications were dead wrong. A close look at the real data shows that the world is quite spiky, defined by surging mega-regions, declining hills (like the Clevelands and St. Louises of the world) and sinking valleys (the poor mega-cities and even poorer rural areas of the emerging economies and developing world).

Florida then quickly moves on to summarize what Hulchanski’s data indicates:

The three Torontos are defined by an increasingly rich and advantaged core, a shrinking middle-class zone, and low-income earners and immigrants at the outskirts. In some ways this is a good thing: Toronto is the opposite of hollowed-out American cities like Detroit and Cleveland. And the pattern is strikingly similar to what is happening in places that are becoming the epicentres of the creative economy. The gentrification of the urban core, with out-of-sight housing prices, is occurring in London, New York, San Francisco, even in Washington, D.C.

From here, he looks at the findings from the perspective of the creative economy:

What we are witnessing in Toronto is the rise of a new set of economic, demographic and social patterns being set in motion by the global creative economy. There is a mass migration of highly educated and highly skilled people to a smaller and smaller number of cities. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has documented the sorting of highly educated, high human-capital households in the United States. Thirty years ago, most cities had a similar proportion of educated and less educated people; now highly educated people are concentrated in just a handful of major metropolitan regions like New York, Washington, San Francisco and Seattle.

They have gravitated to the cores of these metros to take advantage of clustered work, gain access to amenities, and reduce their time costs spent on travel. In the five-year period from 2000 to 2005, New York City took in 285,000 recent college graduates – a number roughly equivalent to the entire population of the city of Buffalo. Driving this is the benefits of economic clustering long ago identified by Jane Jacobs. It is the clustering of people, even more so than the clustering of business and industry, that today is the motor force of economic growth.

Left to its own devices, this clustering is causing the sorting of people by economic class. Not just across cities but within them, as the U of T report demonstrates.

Florida adds that “the leading U.S. creative regions (San Francisco, Austin, the North Carolina Research Triangle, and Washington) also have the highest levels of income inequality.” Obviously, if you want the creative economy to have longer-term sustainability, you have to work against destructive economic inequality. Over the long run, cities won’t be well-served by incredibly high housing prices in the trendier centre, serviced by an underclass that lives on the outskirts of town.

That would put a whole new spin on Jane Jacobs’s definition of oversuccess.

Since the link will undoubtedly deteriorate over time, I’ll just quote the article in its entirety, shall I?

James Howard Kunstler, an American writer on cities, may be the continent’s leading suburbologist. With books like The Geography of Nowhere and last year’s The Long Emergency, Mr. Kunstler has spent the past two decades building a sustained critique of the postwar suburb, and the energy-wasting, sedentary, under-stimulated lifestyle it promotes.

Those opinions brought him to Kelowna last week as a speaker to the annual gathering of British Columbia’s urban planners.

Mr. Kunstler did not blanch from proffering opinions about the much a-building Okanagan city after a quick walk and driving tour with local urbanists.

“Why does downtown hardly have any buildings over two storeys?,” was one of his first questions, quickly followed by “Why is the architecture so bad?”

My answer to his first question was quite simple: Kelowna is a 20th-century city, shaped by the automobile and an orchard-based economy that decentralized jobs, residences and shopping, and never had much use for a downtown except as a place that Edwardians parked a few banks, cafes and doctor’s offices. Because it is younger than Calgary or Vancouver, Kelowna has had an automotive strip almost as long as it has been a city, today stretching north to Vernon and beyond in an astonishing agglomeration of franchise businesses, shopping malls and low-slung office parks. In bluntly functional terms, the strip is more Kelowna’s real heart than those few brick blocks near the floating bridge.

As for design, I am not sure if Kelowna’s architecture really is worse than other cities in the Interior, and there are counters to Mr. Kunstler’s sour initial impression of its new arts precinct, where a public library, art gallery and other civic structures belie the ambitions of British Columbia’s fastest-growing city.

There is a downside to this rapid growth, however.

Kelowna recently passed both Calgary and Toronto for the dour distinction of having Canada’s second-highest average housing prices, behind only Vancouver.

Mr. Kunstler is skeptical about the power of design panels — such as Vancouver’s — to improve the visual quality of boom-time urban life: “Design review boards are dysfunctional, and design guidelines are uniformly lame,” he says. “By designing-out chaos, they create sterile buildings.”

The Okanagan urban policy that most impressed Mr. Kunstler is British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve. Building on the theme of The Long Emergency, he sees a not-so-distant future where energy is so expensive that high rise towers will be abandoned for want of electricity to run their elevators, and when food will of necessity only be local: “The ALR is very prescient for what it could do for food security.”

Mr. Kunstler is right only to the degree that future diets will consist of grapes and wine. The orchards that made the Okanagan valley Canada’s fruit basket are disappearing at a depressing rate, replaced solely with vineyards and backyards. The backyards come from a whittling-away of land from the ALR, and the massive housing estates now rising on reserve lands owned by the Westbank Band. These vast new subdivisions are not subject to the ALR or other outside land use controls, resulting in 9,000 of its current on-reserve population of 9,500 now being non-native.

Mission Hill Estate’s hilltop winery, designed by Seattle architect Tom Kundig for proprietor Anthony von Mendl, is a Xanadu, looking when new like a medieval French or Italian chateau. But five years later it has come to resemble a theme mall or religious school, its visual presence dulled by being nearly surrounded by Westbank’s pervasive sprawl.

Mr. Kunstler was less forthcoming with ideas on how places like Kelowna can stop sprawling and start shaping dense and lively neighbourhoods. His plenary talk was full of easy slams at the empty walls and banal functionality of modern architecture, and displayed a few too many nostalgic snaps of antique piazzas in Europe. ‘Make it Siena’ Mr. Kuntsler seems to be saying, or at very least, ‘make it Saratoga Springs,’ the 19th-century spa and racecourse town in upstate New York he calls home.

This revealing Europhilia and simplistic promotion of resorts as models for cities is rife among the New Urbanists, for whom Mr. Kunstler has been a prominent spokesman. The New Urbanism has found little purchase in Canada, in part because the Greco-Roman nostalgia much evident in Mr. Kunstler’s slides does not jibe with our multi-cultural realities, but more importantly, because the densities and urban layouts it promotes have long been the norm in our nation.

The radical alternative down south is old hat here. This is both because Canada never let its downtowns depopulate or racially stratify and because we lack such public subsidies to sprawl as the American’s tax deductibility of mortgage interest payments or the interstate highway system.

Some of Mr. Kunstler’s most apt jeremiads are directed at the environmental movement and the use of landscaping to camouflage the banality of contemporary city-building. He chides the Sierra Club and their ilk for only seeing nature for its scenic and recreational possibilities: “If they really want the natural realm preserved, they should have spent the last four decades lobbying for smart urban growth.” He also cautioned Kelowna against camouflaging architectural errors with shrubbery.

“The New Urbanism is a temporary correction,” he says, one having an imminent expiry date, because much more radical efforts will soon have to be launched to deal with an energy-hungry future. No matter how addicted society has become to this urban version of fast food, “Suburban life is coming off the menu.”

Since I myself have such disdain (if not outright loathing) for much of what Kunstler has to say (and perhaps more to the point, how he says it), I’ll just add: New Yorbanism (by John Lumea). And if that’s not enough, do please look through these Jane Jacobs links for more: City Views: Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her legacy; as well as this Portland State University project, jane jacobs in portland, which links to a film by that group, called Jane Jacobs: Parting Words (an absolute “must see!”); and last but not least an interview Jim Kunstler himself conducted with Ms Jacobs in 2000, Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler (done for Metropolis Magazine, but posted on Kunstler’s website), which goes on to a page 2, where she really gets some choice words in. Great interview.

JJ: … The notion — and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism—the notion of the shopping center a valid kind of downtown. That’s taken over. Its very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

JHK: We are starting to return to that particularly in the work of Victor Dover and Joe Kohl.

JJ: I don’t know them.

JHK: They are young guys who were trained at the University of Miami by Duany and Plater-Zyberk and they started their own firm about ten years ago. They have done two projects where they have taken dead malls and imposed a street and block plan over them and created codes so that the individual lots could be developed as buildings not just as a megaproject. So I think that’s definitely the direction the New Urbanists are going in. I think that we are leaving the age of the megaproject.

JJ: Here’s what I think is happening. I look at the, what happened at the end of Victorianism. Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of “it’s the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century.” This happened before the first world war and it wasn’t just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. That was one of the first places it was happening. But it was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren’t ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously. (…)

JJ: What was a really major bad idea about the Garden City was you take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world that you make without the old world. And Mumford fell for that and the whole “this is the twentieth century” thing. The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

(…)

JHK: I’d like to turn to economics which is another principle area of your interest and I think perhaps one that is underemphasized in your career. I’m also interested in systems theories, but particularly the ones that address the great blunders of civilization. It seems to me that the American living arrangement, the “the fiasco of suburbia” as Leon Krier calls it, is approaching a kind of tipping point beyond which it might be difficult to carry on. I have a theory that we don’t have to run out of gasoline in order to throw places of Houston, Phoenix, San Jose, Miami, Atlanta into terrible trouble. All that’s necessary is a mild to moderate chronic instability in the world oil markets. it seems to me that we are sleepwalking into an economic and political trainwreck.

JJ: Well, I don’t’ know whether we will because of the oil markets or what. But I know things won’t go on as they are now. People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists—they are always wrong. I am not saying how it is going to go. But it is not going to go the same. This is a continuation of what I was actually saying about the revolt against Victorianism. Here comes a generation or two that just can’t stand what the previous generations did. And for whatever reasons it is they want to expunge it. And they are absolutely ruthless with the remnants of it. But I don’t think of it as an economic or political trainwreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that’s coming. And I think that part of the growing popularity of the New Urbanism is not simply because it is so rational, and not simply because people care so much about community or even understand it, or the relation of sprawl to the ruination of the natural world. But they just don’t like what is around. And they will be ruthless with it.

JHK: I wonder if it will take an economic shock to prompt the majority of American to really reconsider their living arrangements.

JJ: I don’t think it’s that rational, that this is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s the reason. Suddenly they can’t stand what the generations before did. There was no reason for Victorianism to be so reacted against in these terms.

(…)

JHK: You say that you are not theoretical or abstract. As a practical matter there is such a thing called the Hubbert Curve, the petroleum depletion curve that says that we will reach a peak of world oil production and then we will go down the slippery slope of having less and less oil, having oil that is harder to extract, or oil that is less economical to extract. And of course this is happening in different regions and different parts of the world. The two places in the world that basically saved our asses in the last twenty years were the north slope of Alaska and the North Sea oil fields. They are scheduled to reach peak production in the next year or so. After which their production will decline. And after that most of the oil in the world will be produced by people who hate us. How does that work for us economically?

JJ: Well, you see all my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

JHK: Well, it’s possible that my proposition is a fallacy. But what if it’s not?

JJ: I basically don’t think that the way we do things is that dependent on one resource, such as oil. There can be different kinds of engines for cars. I think that solar heating, wind heating can substitute for a lot of uses for oil. I’d like to see those things happen because they are more sustainable in any case. But I do not think that running out of oil is not going to bother us that much. I think we have got to be rescued by something or we really are going down a slippery slope.

JHK: If its not petroleum then what is it that is putting us in peril?

JJ: I don’t think probably any one thing. Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes. And I think that one of the things is a reaction against Modernism in this case and everything associated with it

JHK: But we are stuck with all this stuff?

JJ: Yes now that’s the next thing. I do not think that we are to be saved by new developments done to New Urbanist principles. That’s all of the good and I am very glad that New Urbanists are educating America. I think that when this takes hold and when enough of the old regulations can be gotten out of the way—which is what is holding things up, that there is going to be some great period of infilling. And a lot of that will be make-shift and messy and it won’t measure up to New Urbanist ideas of design—but it will measure up to a lot of their other philosophy. And in fact if there isn’t a lot of this popular and make-shift infilling, the suburbs will never get corrected. It’s only going to happen that way. And I think that it will happen that way.

JHK: I have the greatest admiration for the New Urbanists. The hardest work for them to do is the urban infill.

And here we have to stop and sound a great big “guh-roh-ahn!” I’m American (among other things), but here’s where Kunstler’s American chauvinism really rubs me the wrong way. So some American cities aren’t “doing infill” correctly — that doesn’t mean that it’s a universal problem. In my city, infill is the norm.

Here’s Jane Jacobs again, for a last word:

JJ: There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things. Is it more necessary to be able to design computers or is more necessary to be able to manufacture computers. I think that it is necessary to do both. I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do the better. But I don’t think that you can dispose of the constructive and inventive things that America is doing—and say oh we aren’t doing anything anymore and we are living off of what the poor Chinese do. It is more complicated than that. There is the example of Detroit which you noticed yourself was once a very prosperous and diverse city. And look what happened when it just specialized on automobiles. Look at Manchester when it specialized in those dark satanic mills, when it specialized in textiles. It was supposed to be the city of the future.

JHK: We have an awful lot of places in America that don’t specialize in anything anymore and don’t produce anything in particular anymore.

JJ: Well that’s better than specializing.