The demographic inversion of the American city
Eric Zimmermann of The New Republic says:
On TNR.com, Professor Alan Ehrenhalt describes the startling trend of “demographic inversion” in American cities:The demographic inversion of the American city (The New Republic)“Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city -- Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center -- some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white -- are those who can afford to do so.”
Of course, this is a stark reversal from the decades of “white flight” that re-shaped the demographics of American cities.
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In the great SF satire Gladiator at Law, the poor live in totally hopeless trashed suburbs -- "Belly Rave" -- while the affluent get shiny high-tech homes.
they had the Games!
Since so many European cities are already like this, and in a different way, so is Beverly Hills, I was not at all surprised to see our city start to "flip" during the Seinfeld years.
What the Washington, DC reality is, though, is that one single family on the block with one single teenager with a drug problem and a gun and friends who moved to the suburbs coming back to distribute drugs alters this "invisible hand" signficantly.
Add into that, entrenched teachers whose idea of "normal" was segregated poverty so that a school twice as good as the 1968 riot years is still much much worse as a suburban school with tech-savvy teachers. I have dozens and dozens of anecdotes, but in a neighborhood with million dollar houses, some teachers:
1. Told me they don't have free time for watching the news or reading the newspaper
2. Did not own their own computer
3. Considered the TV show Barney "educational" for elementary school kids in spite of the kids angrily complaining to her in front of me that it was for babies.
4. Stated that "most of the kids in the class couldn't afford good clothes" despite that 16 out of 18 of the families were married professionals including a real estate flipper and landlord, several PhDs and two entrepreneurs and zero evidence that day that any of the kids were not dressed in really good clothes.
In other words, the school teachers and likely other city support services are NOT in-tune with this demographic shift and many are actively hostile to this shift.
Sounds like what is happening in Atlanta. They are tearing down the older and run down apartment complexes and building shiny towers that no one I know can afford to live in. Meanwhile, they increase my rent at one of the older complexes, because they can, and the poor people from the torn down complexes move to the suburbs. Housing in the 'burbs is more affordable, but getting back into the city to work is problematic, since the traditional suburbanites blocked expansion of bus and train routes.
The suburbs are kind of boring.
The city is where life happens.
Choose life!
This is somewhat less startling for those who live in the NYC Metroplex.
As Houston grows ever larger, the small cities that were far-flung white-flight 'burbs end up getting surrounded by Houston but remain autonomous. They remain the specks of light in an encroaching ghetto. (Houston has pockets of bohemians and the affluent moving back into the city, especially downtown lofts and near the Texas Medical Center, but those are definitely the exception in my experience.)
same goes for Los Angeles. just look at what Jan Perry is doing with the "revitalization" of downtown.
Oh boy. I'm an American studying urban planning in Europe, and based upon the demographic changes we've been seeing here, I've been sort of waiting for America to get to the same point.
The same effect is creating entrenched poverty in European cities today. The riots in French suburbs are the most extreme example, but the dynamic of shitty housing developments, few local jobs, low tax revenue, and the resulting lack of quality social and physical infrastructure are making the suburbs into very nasty places all over Europe.
And I guarantee you America will be hit much, much harder. People are not only increasingly unable to "choose the city, where life happens" (cute, Anon, really - ever paid your own rent?). Because America has so little public transit, people who can't afford a car could end up being nearly immobile in their homes, considering the high gas prices. Decent jobs and education will be simply out of reach.
It's going to be a mess. That may sound alarmist, but honestly, it will be a mess.
Wow, I wonder what that will do to housing prices in the City of Pittsburgh (where I live an'at). Housing here can be quite cheap.
However, we're seeing the same things mentioned above, and in the article -- blocks of neat old homes are being replaced with high-rise condos that are way outside of the norm in price for housing here.
McCondos are replacing the ornate wood, pocket-doors, and marble fireplaces. Abercrombie, PEAK, and similarly priced shops are replacing... I don't remember what they are replacing, and there may have only been run-down warehouses to begin with!
When this started Happening in Chattanooga a few years ago I referred to it as the urban ethnic donut effect.
@Raisedbywolves (without snark or malice at all)
Has there ever been an era that people haven't said "it will be a mess"?
Factors and situations are always changing, people will adapt. I honestly don't know the current stats, perhaps someone else here does, but I imagine that the rise in gas prices might have renewed some interest in expanding public transit. I could be wrong in that assumption though.
The real problem with saying "it's going to be a mess" isn't only that your basically saying that the sky is falling. That's sort of a given. The sky is in fact falling, and always will fall. The key is that the sky is never actually going to hit the ground.
I only came to this realization after reading a rather small and very sarcastic comment on another thread regaarding the current gas crisis. It basically boiled down to "Your right, no one ever innovates, no one ever makes any progress, the only real change is that things get worse".
My personal view is that when faced with an immediate problem, people try and fix it. Things may suck for a little bit, but writing off the whole situation as a mess is defeatist.
I see the current gas situation (and by proxy the urban ethnic donut effect) in the U.S. and hope that it will be the beginning of a public transport revolution here, possibly based on the European model (which I've always heard and assumed was superior). I'm waiting to see if we take this opportunity to expand our train systems and put more buses on the road which will be better for everybody.
Granted there will be those (the poor)who may not get the immediate relief that they need. But many progressive, efficient systems that benefit the affluent eventually benefit the less affluent. I'm not trying to advance the trickle down theory as a universal truth, just saying that it does happen when progress is universally beneficial.
I'm not trying to call you out Raisedbywolves, just hoping that someone might read this as I read the comment quoted above and come out with a brighter, more progressive outlook. If you look for opportunities to innovate and progress, you won't have time to notice the heavens gradually getting closer and closer.
This is good. With each swing of the pendulum, we get more integration towards a more homogeneous equilibrium, on the interfaces between neighborhoods. When I lived in Evanston and commuted on the elevated trains to downtown in the early 1990s, I was pleased that the North was integrating so well, unlike the South Side. But on later visits to UC you could see it, too, with middle class whites buying and improving properties, and beginning the gentrification which would be impossible if they were still building monolithic projects for the poor.
Of course, the declining real wages that we have seen through the Bush years erases the integration gains in overall quality of life measures, but I'm cautiously hopeful about 20 January 2009 at this point.
Other than the construction and destruction of high rise housing projects Chicago has changed very little in half a century.
The South Side and West Side have always been much poorer than the area surrounding downtown Chicago. There are pockets of poorer areas in the Far North of Chicago but if you go much beyond it becomes Evanston. Chicago has gentrified a bit going W and NW and along the lakefront but nothing that hasn't been happening for 20 years.
The only 'white flight' that I know anything about in any detail occured in Brooklyn and Queens in NYC -- from the edge of the city, not the center.
I didn't read the whole piece but it seems like somebody wanted to say something cool and bold like 'Chicago is now like Vienna in the 19th century!' and then just regurgitated what everybody already knows -- the more desireable someplace is, the more it costs, and poorer people will live on the outskirts of these places. Is any of that new?
@#9: Planner to planner, I have to disagree with you. Culturally we've always had this Jeffersonian notion in the USA that a man should have a nice piece of property with lots of fresh air and slaves. Yes, we have some dense old cities build out of necessity, but we've been a nation of suburbs for a good 150 years... well before the automobile, the streetcar systems were taking people way out into the boondocks. Here in Michigan, electric rail would take you 60 miles out of the city, and that was where a lot of people (rich and poor) chose to live. Many suburban cities are now at least talking about bringing back some of that spoke-and-hub transit.
There's a demographic bubble right now that might prefer the city, but fundamentally I think we're still a nation of suburbanites.
@ 11: Ha, you're basically right... I probably should have said that "It will be a different kind of mess". Also, if I were completely convinced that our cities are fucked beyond repair, I'd pick a different line of work ;)
But actually, there was a period in which people didn't say "it will be a mess". It was called Modernism. They said, "We're going to create a new kind of city, and people will adapt."
And they created our current mess...
@ Patrick: I grew up in the suburbs/exurbs, and I definitely agree that that lifestyle seems pretty entrenched in the American consciousness. But I'm just not sure how the rising cost of car ownership might end up affecting that pattern. It would be great to see new spoke-and-hub public transit systems arising, but I'm sceptical that those kinds of systems could adequately service extremely decentralized regions.
I guess we'll all just have to wait and see, but I think a large amount of the future challenges planners will face in the next few decades are going to arise out of the "urban donut" situation.
Because America has so little public transit, people who can't afford a car could end up being nearly immobile in their homes, considering the high gas prices. Decent jobs and education will be simply out of reach.
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I grew up in the 1970s and what you describe above was exactly the experience of our friends' immigrant grandparents or aunts and uncles. They'd move to America without knowing how (or wanting) to drive and end up in the suburbs. They'd have nothing they could walk to and due to language were almost always isolated in their yards and homes and separated from their craft lifestyles- I remember grandparents knitting sweaters and sewing clothes that looked so crappy compared to what you could by for $10 even back then- let alone this was the introduction of the Izod. It meant that people who were pretty smart had jobs like "school crossing guard" and "lunch lady."
The real problem with saying "it's going to be a mess" isn't only that your basically saying that the sky is falling. That's sort of a given. The sky is in fact falling, and always will fall. The key is that the sky is never actually going to hit the ground.
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This is totally false. The sky hit the ground in countless eras. Specifically during the first push to the suburbs aka white flight, the governments in the US (local, state, federal) took lots and lots of tax dollars out of the city and poured them into suburban development, like schools and roads. The people who lived in the city got nothing, sometimes literally schools were not remodeled for years and a mere 20 years after the end of WW2, the inner city residents started rioting, first in Watts, then in Newark, then nationally in 1968 and finally ending with the Bronx is Burning era of 1974-1977 New York. To say that the sky never fell is to be ignorant of US history where, in April 1968, after 23 years of neglect, the sky fell all over this country.
There is a brief mention of this happening in Bruce Sterling's Islands In The Net. If I recall correctly, the reason he gave was that transportation fuel becomes so expensive that the wealthy move back in to urban centers to avoid expensive commutes. They leave behind suburbs that become slums.
Thank you for the history lesson, Neener. People have this picture of an incredibly privileged world full of choices and possibilities for everyone, regardless of spatial considerations.
The truth is way more complicated and difficult and problematic.
It would be incredibly helpful if we could get over the idea that progress marches inevitably on toward more freedom and more comfort for everybody, and/or social equilibrium.
Then we could roll up our sleeves and start on the massive project it will be to improve our social and physical infrastructure in a way as to prevent the kind of disaster we had in '68.
RaiseByWolves,
The thing about it is if you have one life or have one house, the idea of losing one of those in a riot is very serious. The idea, over all, that life goes on is not an awful one to take, presuming life goes on. But what happened in the MLK riots was that:
a. people died
b. homes and people's lifetime of material possessions were destroyed- as a kid I'd here people talk about losing wedding albums and childrens toys
c. stores were destroyed and were not replaced by new stores for 10 to 30(!) years. As late as the 1980s I drove by buildings burnt out from the riots
d. People who lived through the riots and children who grew up around the riots had their worldviews changed and influenced by the riots in ways that were likely, not useful to society as a whole.
It's all too easy to say that the world ebbs and flows, but if it's your wife who gets burned alive in a store, or even your car that someone overturns and burns, then the ability to see "long range" is pretty ridiculous.
@Anonymous #5
Maybe, but the point of the article is that only the rich can afford to live in the city. If "choosing life" requires me to be rich, there's no real choice, is there?