Vox Populi

Every couple of years D magazine publishes an article ranking the various Dallas suburbs in order of desirability. Perhaps surprisingly, my little urban neighborhood of University Park usually comes in at number one or two, which is odd because it’s in the center of the city (check out the map in the article.) The independent government and school district make it qualify as a “suburb,” I suppose. The fascinating parts of the article are the criteria they use. This gives a pretty good idea of what the average (at least in their estimation) suburbanite wants (much like the Morning News poll), which dovetails nicely with the theory of the perceptions of suburbs I’ve been observing.

Their criteria are fourfold:

1) Education. This is simply the percentage of students in the local district passing the State tests, the mean SAT Score (check the Park Cities in the sidebar,) and money per student spent on instruction. This gives an idea, regardless of distance or configuration, of the importance of school districts. It also pays to be an independent entity.

2) Housing. This is a stacked deck against the urban environment. Half the score is determined by the percentage of housing that is owner-occupied. Multi-family housing is, by their definition, undesirable regardless of its quality or size. The second (and more rational) criterion is average sale price. Note how much better the more urban suburbs do in this one.

3) Safety. Simple crime statistics – with double weight given to the violent crimes in the index. Crime comes up time after time in discussions of cities (and even in these pages.) True or not, the central city has a serious perception problem.

4) Ambience and Air Quality. While the air quality statistic is fairly prosaic, it’s nice to see someone finally acknowledging the human environment. The question is: exactly how important is the look and feel of a place to live to someone’s mental calculus?

Of course, what’s missing are the transportation and economic factors in each city. Does walkability matter (other than as a contributor to “ambience”?) Commute times were specifically disregarded, which is partially due to suburban assumptions, and partially due to Dallas’ place as a new kind of city with more suburb-to-suburb commuting.

This is the problem I’m trying to work out. There are the criteria above from the demand side, the making-a-buck criteria from the supply side, and their intersection in both how you execute it and what the long-term impact is. Surely a fully functioning community is worth more that the “ambience” of a suburb by a lake. It just has to be.