In this post we’ll take a deeper look at the relationship
between children and housing, and then do a simple model of Burnet Rd
demographics, assuming current housing trends, to predict where our community’s
demographics end up in a generation.
We’ll end with some intriguing news from SoCo.
Before I start, a quick disclaimer. I am not a statistician. I am offering data
with the hope it will be further refined and validated by City staff. I’ve presented these data and no one has
called out any obvious errors, but nor to my knowledge has there been a formal
review.
Kids
and Housing – Tightly Coupled in Northern Cities
You might recall from a previous post that in Vancouver,
communities with lots of multi-bedroom housing also have lots of kids. I’m using a statistical measure called
R-squared (R^2). Broadly speaking, R^2
measures how close real world data (dots on a scattergraph) “fit” to a line
generated by your mathematical model.
An R-squared value of 1 would mean that your equation perfectly
describes the real world data.
(Statisticians dream about this.
It never happens.) In most
cases, an R^2 result of .8 or .9 means if you know one thing, you can predict
the other thing.
In northern cities, the R^2 fit between kids and
multi-bedroom housing is strong. In
Vancouver, it was 0.81 for all neighborhoods, and 0.9 for middle and upper
income neighborhoods. In Boston, R^2 =
.8. Portland R^2 = .87 (fit against a
log curve). Seattle R^2 = .9.
We don’t see these correlations in southern cities like
Raleigh, Dallas, or Austin. When I run
this for all census tracts in Travis County, I get R^2 = .35. That doesn’t mean a lot.
What’s Going On in Austin, Texas?
I’m not entirely sure why multi-bedroom housing in a place
like Vancouver so closely predicts children, but doesn’t in Austin. Here are some possibilities.
- Austin
(and other southern cities) have a lot of single family housing, and a lot
of big apartments. Not much in
between.
- We
can sprawl. Given the stark choice
between a Cedar Park house in a great school district but a grueling
commute, and a two-bedroom unit in a big apartment and community that is
otherwise not especially family-oriented, middle income families go with
Cedar Park.
- Conversely,
Austin’s notorious income inequality means lower income families will make
do with whatever housing they can get, even tiny apartments.
If you take out Travis County’s lower income communities and
just run a correlation on middle class neighborhoods, you get a more
respectable R^2 of 0.6. That’s enough
to visually distinguish the arc of yellow dots (middle class communities) in
the graph below.
One conclusion you can’t cleanly draw from these data is a
correlation between a given housing type and poverty. Lower income communities are found both in areas with lots of
apartments (like Rundberg), and also in
suburban communities (like the area north of Austin Bergstrom International
Airport). Desperate people will cram
into any kind of housing – efficiencies, ranch houses, expropriated mansions.
What is striking about Rundberg is how quickly and sharply
the area declined. The housing there is
not that old – 1970s-80s. The main
driver here was probably economic, but the high concentration of big, aging
apartments may trap poverty. One hint –
median incomes on the northwest corner of Lamar-Rundberg are $10,000 higher
than on the southeast corner. The
southeast corner has a much higher concentration of big apartment blocks with
single occupancy units.
What’s going to happen on Burnet Rd?
The future is here!
Burnet Rd already has a neighborhood that reflects the kind of
demographics we could have for the entire area a generation from now. It’s “Baja Brentwood.” In the housing/children graph, southern
Brentwood’s housing is close to 50% efficiencies and one-bedrooms. And its weight of children in the population
has fallen to just 11%.
Gentrification is in full swing. The housing mix continues
to shift towards more single occupancy units.
Families are locked out of half the housing market, and are competing
with everybody else for the other half.
As housing rents skyrocket in Brentwood and throughout the urban core,
it becomes harder for families to remain.
Less safe outdoor conditions from chronic on-street parking, and the
relative decline of family-oriented area services, accelerate the outflux.
This last graphic attempts to model, in broad brush strokes,
what kind of housing mix we’ll have on the middle part of Burnet Rd (from 2222
to Anderson) in 25 years. Assuming at
trend construction of new apartments on land already zoned for them, plus some
‘transition zone’ housing along the edges of the corridor as a result of CodeNext,
the area’s housing mix winds up as majority single occupancy units – not too
different from what we have in Clarksville near Downtown (54% efficiencies and
one-bedrooms; children at 10% of the
population).
This happens despite the transition zones. The demographic weight of the big apartments
just overwhelms everything else.
Babies
in Bouldin
Let’s end on a cautiously positive note. One of the outliers on the
housing-to-children graph above is Bouldin Creek, west of South Congress. The 2014 American Community Survey (ACS)
data show a surprisingly high 22% kids in the population, despite a continued
decline in the weight of multi-bedroom housing (61% multi-bedroom units.)
A closer look reveals a little Bouldin baby boom.
For years, the story in Austin and other cities has been
predictable – those young families will pack up and leave for the suburbs. But if Bouldin represents a
millennials-driven shift in market demand, it could become easier to make the
case to RECA for housing that doesn’t exclude families.
