New Census data: Americans are returning to the far-flung suburbs

By Emily Badger March 26

During the housing bubble, Americans moved in droves to the exurbs, to newly paved subdivisions on what was once rural land. Far-out suburbs had some of the fastest population growth in the country in the early 2000s, fueled by cheap housing and easy mortgages. And these places helped redefine how we think about metropolitan areas like Washington, pushing their edges farther and farther from the traditional downtown.

In the wake of the housing crash, these same places took the biggest hit. Population growth in the exurbs stalled. They produced a new American phenomenon: the ghost subdivision of developments abandoned during the housing collapse before anyone got around to finishing the roads or sidewalks.

These scenes and demographic trends left the impression that maybe Americans had changed their minds about exurban living. New Census data, though, suggests that eight years after the housing crash, Americans are starting to move back there again.

The fledgling trend, captured in data through 2014, raises questions about whether American preferences for where and how to live truly changed much during the housing bust, or if we simply put our exurban aspirations on hold. At the same time, the shift calls into question a parallel and popular narrative: that Americans who once preferred the suburbs would now rather move into the city.

Demographic data over the last three years have tentatively supported this argument, with implications for the type of housing Americans want (smaller homes over large McMansions), the type of communities they prefer ("walkable" over car-dependent ones), and where developers should plan to build. The evidence: From 2011 until 2013, dense counties at the center of large metropolitan areas in the U.S. saw faster population growth than the exurbs, a fact cheered by city-lovers as a sign that urban living was on the rise again.

The updated Census county population estimates released Thursday, though, show that the exurbs are now again growing faster than more urban places, according to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.

This shift — urban areas surpassing exurbs, then falling behind again — is illustrated by the blue and yellow lines above, using a classification developed several years ago by Brookings.

That picture doesn't mean that more Americans now live in exurbs than what Frey calls the "urban core," nor that cities are even shrinking. It means, rather, that the most urban counties are now growing more slowly than counties containing the far-out suburbs.

"It’s not going to be reverting back to the early part of 2000s when we had this maniac exurban and suburban growth," Frey predicts. But it does appear now that the last three years were atypical.

Demographers have been waiting for new data about migration patterns and population growth because our understanding of what Americans want for the last several years has been clouded by the weak economy. Did far-flung suburbs stop growing because fewer families wanted to live there, or because fewer families had the means to move (and fewer builders the demand to build)? Likewise, have people been staying in cities because they want to be there, or because they haven't been able to leave?

For the last several years, it's been difficult to untangle the economic story (people can't move to the suburbs) from the preference story (people don't want to).

"There are too many things happening at one time to be able to say 'that’s going to be the future,'" Frey says of the resurgence of cities. "I think a lot of this so-called 'return to the city' has a lot to do with people kind of being stuck in place because they can’t qualify for a mortgage, they can’t get a job, they're still paying tuition, they're living in their parents' basement. All of that is a time-specific, almost generation-specific phenomenon. It’s hard to pull that out and say this just means people are going to stay in the city."

From the start of the housing crash in 2006 until just the last few years, fewer people have been leaving the most urban counties as the steep yellow line here shows: Among the largest metropolitan areas in the country, the "urban core" lost more than 1.2 million net residents on the eve of the housing bust, a number that has shrunk considerably since then.

Now that trend appears to be reversing, too. Urban areas may still be growing despite the loss of residents to other parts of the country, thanks to foreign immigration and the natural population growth that occurs when people have children. Domestic migration, though, tells us something important about where people chose to move when they leave one part of the country for another.

Frey is still cautious about what these trends mean in the long run, in part because Americans are still moving at much lower rates than usual. During down times in the economy, we're more likely to stay put wherever we are because we're not moving for new jobs, or to buy new homes, or because many of us are putting off major life transitions like having a family or moving out on our own. This picture of where Americans want to move is also partly complicated by policies that make it easier for developers to build new — and cheaper — housing in the exurbs than in the heart of dense cities.

The question of whether Millennials in particular have changed their housing preferences — opting for cities over suburbs at higher rates than their parents did — will take a few more years to answer definitively. Young adults are only now starting to graduate from college into a world where they have more job options.

"We’ll have to wait until there's a generation of kids that come out that have opportunities to make decisions based on their preferences rather than just constraints," Frey says. "That’s not yet happened, either. It may be starting to happen."

BLOGGER'S NOTE:  This is really not so difficult to discern.  Young people love the city.  They are willing to live, packed like sardines, in tiny apartments over restaurants and bars.  They love the lights, the noise, the excitement.  And if they marry and have a child, a two or three year old will be happy with whenever you can take him/her to the park.  But when parents start thinking long term they wonder if they really want their 12 year old taking METRO across town to go to school.  And what about the skate board, where are the ball fields, can we afford private school?  Is it safe to just let my 5 year old go outside by themselves?  NO, no it's not.  All this is good news for parents and grandparents like me, trying to lure our children and grandchildren back to the neighborhoods they were raised in.  Come on home, we kept a place for you and the kids <3

Violent arrest of black U-Va. student sparks scrutiny of Virginia ABC

by Nick Anderson, Emma Brown and Laura Vozzella March 19 at 8:17 PM
 

CHARLOTTESVILLE — The violent arrest of a University of Virginia student sparked new scrutiny of Virginia’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control on Thursday as university officials and Richmond lawmakers questioned the tactics and approach of the agency’s law enforcement officers.

The arrest put Charlottesville at the center of a national debate over white police officers’ treatment of black youths, and it brought long-simmering racial tensions to the surface at a school steeped in Southern tradition.

The bloody incident also spurred student protests and what Virginia State Police said would be a “comprehensive investigation” into the arrest, both an administrative review at Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s request and a criminal investigation at the behest of local prosecutors.

“Getting arrested shouldn’t involve getting stitches,” U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan said in an interview with The Washington Post. Sullivan met with the student Thursday, and she wrote in a letter to alumni that “members of our community should feel safe from the threat of bodily harm and other forms of violence.” 

White ABC officers arrested the black student, junior Martese Johnson, 20, after he was denied entry to the Trinity Irish Pub early Wednesday near the end of St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Johnson suffered head injuries that left bloody streaks down his face, images that spread quickly on social media, inspiring outrage around the country.

Lawyer of U-Va. student injured by police says he had no fake ID(1:41)

The lawyer representing University of Virginia student Martese Johnson, 20, says his client was "shocked" by the altercation with ABC police officers that left him bloodied and needing 10 stitches in his head. (AP)

 

“I’m shocked that my face was slammed into the brick pavement just across the street from where I attend school,” Johnson said through his attorney at a news conference here late Thursday. Johnson stood next to his attorney, cuts visible on the student’s head. “As the officers held me down, one thought raced through my mind: ‘How could this happen?’ ”

Student cellphone videos from the scene show Johnson lying on the ground with three officers on top of him, but they do not show what happened in the moments before the arrest or how the student was injured.

Johnson’s attorney, Daniel P. Watkins, said the student never offered fake identification to enter the pub. Instead, the student gave a valid Illinois state ID. When an employee at the bar asked Johnson for his Zip code, Johnson gave the Zip code for his mother’s current address, which differed from the Zip code on the identification card, which was issued four years ago, Watkins said.

Watkins said that after Johnson was turned away from the bar, Virginia ABC officers then questioned Johnson about possessing false identification, a conversation that led to the student “being thrown to the ground . . . his face and skull bleeding and needing surgery.” 

Johnson is an elected representative to the school’s prestigious Honor Committee, which upholds U-Va.’s honor code. He was raised by a single mother on the South Side of Chicago and is attending U-Va. on a full scholarship.

Police charged Johnson with misdemeanor profane swearing and/or public intoxication and obstruction of justice without force; Watkins said he will fight to clear Johnson’s name with “the utmost vigor.”

“Martese Johnson is an upstanding young man with a bright future,” Watkins said.

 

Around the country, Johnson’s arrest joined Ferguson, Mo., and #BlackLivesMatter as a topic in conversations about fighting back against police brutality. On campus, the arrest triggered discussion about the long history of racism at the university and across Virginia.

Jalen Ross, a U-Va. senior who describes himself as biracial, said there are plenty of minority students on campus who are happy. “I’m one of them,” said Ross, U-Va’s student council president. But he said he can understand those who feel less comfortable at a university that was founded by Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, and built with slave labor. “There’s a lot of history to wrangle with,” Ross said. “For minority students, that's not a good history.”

Dante DeVito, 24, said he worked for two years as a bouncer at Trinity, the bar where Johnson was arrested, before graduating from U-Va. last year. DeVito said he was instructed to examine black students and their identification more closely than other students. And ABC agents were often waiting to question students who were turned away. “They would wait for us to reject somebody, and then they would scrutinize the person we rejected,” DeVito said.

Ryan Rooney, who said he is the owner of Trinity, said his business had nothing to do with Wednesday’s incident.

“We were just the address where it happened in front of,” Rooney said. “We had nothing to do with the ABC agents actions.”

He confirmed that DeVito was a former Trinity employee. Rooney said his business does not have a policy to discriminate against black patrons who attempt to enter the bar. “That is ridiculous and totally false,” he said.

Dante Crawford, a longtime Trinity staffer, said that as a black man he did not feel discriminated against at the bar: “[I] would never work there if prejudice was prevalent.”

Unlike other recent cases involving white law enforcement agents and young black men, the officers in this case were not municipal police officers. Nor were they university officers.

They were employees of the Virginia ABC, three of the 130 special agents who have full police powers to enforce liquor laws in the state’s bars and restaurants and prevent underage drinking.

“That’s not even regular police, that’s ABC,” a man can be heard saying on a video of Johnson’s arrest, which occurred on the sidewalk near a strip of restaurants and bars adjacent to campus called “The Corner.” 

ABC officials have said that Johnson was charged with the two misdemeanors but declined to detail why he was physically taken to the ground; in Virginia, it is against the law for people younger than 21 to have alcohol in their system. ABC spokeswoman Rebecca Gettings said the agency will have nothing more to say about the incident while the state police investigation is underway. 

Gettings didn’t immediately provide answers to questions about how many agents the ABC has on the ground in Charlottesville — where it has a regional office — and how many arrests they have made monthly in the city during the past two years. ABC agents made 1,670 arrests statewide in the most recent fiscal year.

The ABC is a leading revenue generator for the state government and is probably best known for operating all of Virginia’s liquor stores. It is less widely known that the law enforcement division has worked to address underage drinking on the state’s college campuses, including at U-Va., where agents launched an intensive effort in 2013.

That increased enforcement effort drew criticism in April 2013 after plainclothes Virginia ABC officers confronted a 20-year-old white student in the parking lot of a Harris Teeter in Charlottesville. Six agents closed in on the student, and one pulled a gun. But instead of carrying a case of beer, as the agents suspected, the student had bottles of LaCroix sparkling water.

The student, Elizabeth Daly, later sued the Virginia ABC and received more than $200,000 in a settlement.

ABC officials then worked to keep a low profile in Charlottesville. But Sullivan said that last fall she asked McAuliffe (D) to bring ABC agents back to the city as a safety measure after the disappearance of sophomore Hannah Graham, who had been drinking with friends the night she vanished. Graham was later found slain.

Sullivan said she had hoped ABC agents would target bars serving underage drinkers — a stronger deterrent, she said, than arresting drunk students. “The help I wanted from ABC was with establishments, not with going after individual students,” she said.

Drinking is a big part of campus culture at U-Va., as it is on college campuses around the country, and alcohol has played a prominent role in recent high-profile cases at the school. In addition to Graham’s disappearance, there was the 2010 slaying of lacrosse player Yeardley Love by her ex-boyfriend, George Huguely V.

But state lawmakers also said they think the agency is too focused on arresting underage drinkers — at the expense of bigger problems. 

“Most of us who are involved with the ABC really wish the ABC would get back to enforcing regulatory alcohol law and get away from hanging outside of grocery stores busting 20-year-olds for buying beer,” said Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax).

Albo, who has long served on a House subcommittee that oversees the ABC, said he would like to see ABC officers focus on issues that they alone are empowered to handle: auditing restaurants’ books to see whether they are observing a law that requires a certain share of their sales to be food.

Under Virginia law, establishments that sell beer and wine must sell a minimum of $2,000 in food a month. Those serving mixed drinks must make 45 percent of their sales in food. Albo said restaurateurs who observe the law are “pretty angry” that some establishments get away with flouting it.

House Minority Leader David J. Toscano (D-Charlottesville) agreed, calling the ABC officers’ actions this week a “shocking” overreaction to underage drinking. “The ABC folks should be inside the restaurant and enforcing the law related to serving underage people instead of outside trying to deal with a problem that is more appropriately dealt with by the local police,” Toscano said.

Pointing to Daly’s arrest in 2013, Toscano said problems with the ABC extend beyond race. But he said he was disturbed by the images of a bloodied Johnson being held down by white officers. “It raises all kinds of concerns,” he said.

BLOGGER'S NOTE:  This reprehensible behavior should spark more than, "scrutiny of the Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Board (ABC)".  It should spark scrutiny of the state of Virginia.  This kind of crap didn't just start, in Virginia, it was born, bred and celebrated there.  Anytime you have a city with a population of 76,000 people CALLED LYNCHBURG you have a f*cking problem.  And if this reporter thinks that by airing the comments of the (one?) black person who works in this bar I never felt discriminated against somehow changes the picture, then he can line up with the rest of the ostriches.  What the Hell did you expect that man to say?  He needs his J-O-B.  But they're not stupid, they feign ignorance, when it suits them.

In this Nov. 25, 2014 photo, police watch the street as protesters gather outside the Ferguson Police Department. (Charlie Riedel/AP)

Ferguson police routinely violate blacks’ rights, federal review finds

 

By Sari Horwitz March 3 at 3:16 PM

The Justice Department will issue findings Wednesday that accuse the police department in Ferguson, Mo., of racial bias and routinely violating the constitutional rights of black citizens by stopping drivers without reasonable suspicion, making arrests without probable cause and using excessive force, officials said.

Federal officials opened their civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department after the uproar in the St. Louis suburb and across the country over the fatal shooting in August of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. A grand jury in St. Louis declined to indict Wilson in November.

Federal officials will not bring civil rights charges against Wilson, but they see their broad civil rights investigation into the troubled Ferguson police department as the way to force significant changes in Ferguson policing.

Outgoing Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said last fall that the need for “wholesale change” in the Ferguson police department was “pretty clear.” In remarks two weeks ago, he said he was “confident that people will be satisfied with the results that we announce.”

In hundreds of interviews and in a broad review of more than 35,000 pages of Ferguson police records and other documents, Justice Department officials found that although African Americans make up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014.

“If the report of the Department of Justice findings is accurate, then it will confirm what Michael Brown’s family has believed all along, and that is that the tragic killing of their unarmed teenage son was part of a systemic pattern of policing of African American citizens in Ferguson,” said Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Brown’s family.

The findings come as Justice Department officials negotiate a settlement with the police department to change its practices. If they are unable to reach an agreement, the Justice Department could bring a lawsuit, as it has done against law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions in recent years. A U.S. official said that Ferguson officials have been cooperating.

As part of its findings, the Justice Department concluded that African Americans accounted for 85 percent of all drivers stopped by Ferguson police officers and 90 percent of all citations issued.

[Archive: Federal civil rights charges unlikely against Ferguson police officer]

 

The Justice Department also plans to release evidence this week of racial bias found in e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials. A November 2008 e-mail, for instance, stated that President Obama could not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

The Justice Department did not identify who wrote this and other racist e-mails and to whom they were sent. Officials at the department spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the review and its findings before Wednesday’s release.

The review concludes that racial bias and a focus on generating revenue over public safety have a profound effect on Ferguson police and court practices and routinely violate the Constitution and federal law.

“This is not the full report, and we need to be careful not to rush to judgment as we saw in August,” said Jeff Roorda, a former Missouri state representative and a spokesman for the St. Louis Police Officers Association.

“We owe it, not just to law enforcement, but to Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner to figure out what’s really going on here so it can be addressed,” he said, referring to others killed by police officers in Cleveland and New York. “Reaching conclusions from statistics about traffic stops I don’t think draws the whole picture.”

The Justice review also found a pattern or practice of Ferguson police using unreasonable force against citizens. In 88 percent of the cases in which the department used force, it was against African Americans.

In Ferguson court cases, African Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by a municipal judge, according to the Justice review. In 2013, African Americans accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.

Justice investigators also reviewed types of arrests and the treatment of detainees in the city jail by Ferguson police officers. They found that from April to September 2014, 95 percent of people held longer than two days were black. The police department also overwhelmingly charges African Americans with certain petty offenses, the investigation concluded.

For example, from 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted for 95 percent of all “manner of walking in roadway” charges, 94 percent of all “failure to comply” charges and 92 percent of all “peace disturbance” charges, the review found.

The shooting of Brown on a Ferguson street on Aug. 9 set off days of often violent clashes between demonstrators and police in the streets of Ferguson. 

Elected officials, protest organizers and community leaders renewed calls Tuesday for Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson to resign — some adding that the department should be disbanded — and said the Justice Department probe should have gone further by investigating other municipal police forces in the area.

“I would speculate that the same pattern and practices of Ferguson exist in every other department in St. Louis County,” said Adolphus Pruitt, the president of the St. Louis NAACP, which has filed racial discrimination complaints against county police. 

He added, “It’s time for the Ferguson police department to disappear.”

Justice Department investigators spent about 100 days in Ferguson, observing police and court practices, including four sessions of the Ferguson Municipal Court. They conducted an analysis of police data on stops, searches and arrests, as well as data collected by the court, and met with neighborhood associations and advocacy groups. The investigators also interviewed city, police and court officials, including the Ferguson police chief and his command staff.

In the past five years, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has opened more than 20 investigations of police departments, more than twice as many as were opened in the previous five.

The department has entered into 15 agreements with law enforcement agencies, including consent decrees with nine of them, including the New Orleans and Albuquerque police departments.

BLOGGER'S NOTE: "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."  Dr. Seuss