Latino growth good for NU?

Anyone familiar with demographics in California knows about the state’s surging Latino population growth. By the year 2020, the numbers of Latinos in the state will exceed the number of non-Hispanic whites, says the California Department of Finance. By 2040, nearly one in every two Californians will be a Latino. Numbers like that will obviously remake California’s political culture, but could they reshape the state’s physical landscape as well — curbing sprawl and accommodating growth in a more sustainable manner? According to participants in the first-ever Latino New Urbanism conference, held October 17th on the University of Southern California campus, that scenario is a distinct possibility. Latinos are far more likely than the average Californian to live in larger households, settle in dense neighborhoods, use public transportation, and commute shorter distances to work. If these patterns can be reinforced, the future shape of California could be far more urban with far less environmental degradation. The conference, organized by the Transportation and Land Use Collaborative (TLU) of Southern California, prominently featured CNU’s Stephanos Polyzoides, principal of Moule & Polyzoides, and drew heavily on research by both USC Professor Dowell Myers and Michael Mendez, whose 2002 MIT master’s thesis was titled Latinos and the New Urbanism: Synergy Against Sprawl. Political heavyweights such as state treasurer Phil Angelides and Los Angeles City Council members Antonio Villaraigosa and Ed Reyes also addressed the conference’s 250 participants. In his comments in the opening session, Mendez played a role similar to the Marley character in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, sketching in bleak terms what California will become if its future Latino majority adopts the sprawl of other Californians. Currently, larger households in denser settings allow a given population of Latinos to fit into 1/3 fewer housing units than non-Latinos, helping give the six predominantly Hispanic cities of greater East Los Angeles higher densities than Boston and San Francisco. But if future generations of Latinos were to mirror characteristics of broader California — a future Mendez calls Latino Sprawl — California’s need for additional housing units would grow from 4.5 million to 7.3 million by 2040, chewing up precious landscape. If Latinos adopted driving patterns typical of Californians, it would mean an additional 192,307 tons of pollution emitted monthly. the latino-urbanist connection While immigrant groups typically cluster in cities before scattering, Polyzoides and Mendez acknowledged special cultural ties between Latinos and urbanism. Polyzoides said that Latin American cities and the American places influenced by them are different from those derived from Northern European models: “more compact, more walkable, more public-space centered, and more monumental.” Latinos in Los Angeles frequently remake their neighborhoods to resemble these urban antecedents. “Almost every Latino garden in LA is walled,” he said. “People have a very strong sense of private space, which only heightens the importance of public space.” Mendez even argues that these efforts collectively amount to “de facto Latinized new urban and smart growth communities.” These homegrown efforts will need bolstering for urbanism to serve as a viable long-term alternative as more Latinos move up the housing ladder, many agreed. Indeed, surveys show Latinos in California are only slightly more likely than non-Latinos to express a preference for dense, mixed-use neighborhoods. “Let’s be clear,” says Katherine Perez, executive director of TLU, acknowledging the challenge ahead. “The average Latino aspires to be not just in the suburbs but the exurbs.” Many believe the solutions start with well-designed choices, with Polyzoides seeing new urbanists refining a California urbanism that draws on similar Mediterranean and Latin influences and attracts a broad population. “The New Urbanism is superbly positioned to deliver Latino culture in the United States. It has a great emphasis on public space,” he says. “People want to be in beautiful public spaces, eating pasta and sipping espresso. That’s generating a design culture that’s popular with a lot of people and friendly to Latin culture.”