METRO POLICY AUGUST 13, 2008
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Thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a snowstorm. A blizzard in January of 1979 dumped some 20 inches on the ground, causing, among other problems, a curtailment of transit service. The few available trains coming downtown from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms. African Americans and Hispanics blamed this on Mayor Michael Bilandic, and he lost the Democratic primary to Jane Byrne a few weeks later.
Today, this could never happen. Not because of climate change, or because the Chicago Transit Authority now runs flawlessly. It couldn't happen because the trains would fill up with minorities and immigrants on the outskirts of the city, and the passengers left stranded at the inner-city stations would be members of the affluent professional class.
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." 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.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
Atlanta, for example, is shifting from an overwhelmingly black to what is likely to soon be a minority-black city. This is happening in part because the white middle class is moving inside the city borders, but more so because blacks are moving out. Between 1990 and 2006, according to research by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, the white population of Atlanta has increased from roughly 30 percent to 35 percent while the black population has declined from 67 percent to 55 percent. In this decade alone, two of Atlanta's huge suburban counties, Clayton and DeKalb, have acquired substantial black majorities, and immigrants arriving from foreign countries are settling primarily there or in similar outlying areas, not within the city itself. The numbers for Washington, D.C. are similar.
Race is not always the critical issue, or even especially relevant, in this demographic shift. Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.
No American city looks like Vancouver at the moment. But quite a few are moving in this direction. Demographic inversions of one sort or another are occurring in urban pockets scattered all across America, many of them in seemingly unlikely places. Charlotte, North Carolina, is in the midst of a downtown building boom dominated by new mixed-use high-rise buildings, with office space on the bottom and condos or rental units above. Even at a moment of economic weakness, the condos are still selling briskly.
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.
Why has demographic inversion begun? For one thing, the deindustrialization of the central city, for all the tragic human dislocations it caused, has eliminated many of the things that made affluent people want to move away from it. Nothing much is manufactured downtown anymore (or anywhere near it), and that means that the noise and grime that prevailed for most of the twentieth century have gone away. Manhattan may seem like a loud and gritty place now, but it is nothing like the city of tenement manufacturing, rumbling elevated trains, and horses and coal dust in the streets that confronted inhabitants in the early 1900s. Third-floor factory lofts, whether in Soho or in St. Louis, can be marketed as attractive and stylish places to live. The urban historian Robert Bruegmann goes so far as to claim that deindustrialization has, on the whole, been good for downtowns because it has permitted so many opportunities for creative reuse of the buildings. I wouldn't go quite that far, and, given the massive job losses of recent years, I doubt most of the residents of Detroit would, either. But it is true that the environmental factors that made middle-class people leave the central city for streetcar suburbs in the 1900s and for station-wagon suburbs in the 1950s do not apply any more.
Nor, in general, does the scourge of urban life in the 1970s and '80s: random street violence. True, the murder rates in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland have climbed in the last few years, but this increase has been propelled in large part by gang- and drug-related violence. For the most part, middle-class people of all colors began to feel safe on the streets of urban America in the 1990s, and they still feel that way. The paralyzing fear that anyone of middle age can still recall vividly from the 1970s--that the shadowy figure passing by on a dark city street at night stands a good chance of being a mugger--is rare these days, and almost nonexistent among young people. Walk around the neighborhood of 14th and U streets in Washington, D.C. on a Saturday night, and you will find it perhaps the liveliest part of the city, at least for those under 25. This is a neighborhood where the riots of 1968 left physical scars that still have not disappeared, and where outsiders were afraid to venture for more than 30 years.
The young newcomers who have rejuvenated 14th and U believe that this recovering slum is the sort of place where they want to spend time and, increasingly, where they want to live. This is the generation that grew up watching "Seinfeld," "Friends," and "Sex and the City," mostly from the comfort of suburban sofas. We have gone from a sitcom world defined by "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" to one that offers a whole range of urban experiences and enticements. I do not claim that a handful of TV shows has somehow produced a new urbanist generation, but it is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this generation, particularly among its elite. In recent years, teaching undergraduates at the University of Richmond, the majority of them from affluent suburban backgrounds, I made a point of asking where they would prefer to live in 15 years--in a suburb or in a neighborhood close to the center of the city. Few ever voted for suburban life.
I can't say that they had necessarily devoted a great deal of thought to the question: When I asked them whether they would want to live in an urban neighborhood without a car, many seemed puzzled and said no. Clearly, we are a long way from producing a generation for whom urban life and automobile ownership are mutually exclusive. In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium is scheduled for construction this year that will allow residents to drive their cars into a garage elevator, ride up to the floor they live on, and park right next to their front door. I have a hard time figuring out whether that is a triumph for urbanism or a defeat. But my guess is that, except in Manhattan, the carless life has yet to achieve any significant traction in the affluent new enclaves of urban America.
Not that cars and the demographic inversion aren't closely related; they are. In Atlanta, where the middle-class return to the city is occurring with more suddenness than perhaps anywhere in the United States, the most frequently cited reason is traffic. People who did not object to a 20-mile commute from the suburbs a decade ago are objecting to it now in part because the same commute takes quite a bit longer. To this, we can add the prospect of $5-per-gallon gasoline. It's impossible at this point to say with any certainty just what energy costs will do to American living patterns over the next decade. Urbanists predicted a return to the city during previous spikes in the cost of gasoline, notably during shortages in the 1970s. They were wrong. Gas prices came down, and the suburbs expanded dramatically. But today's prices at the pump are not the result of political pressures by angry sheiks in the Persian Gulf. They are the result of increased worldwide demand that is only going to continue to increase. Some suburbanites will simply stay where they are and accept the cost. But many will decide to stop paying $100 every few days for a tank of gasoline that will allow them to commute 40 or 50 miles a day, round-trip.
Ultimately, though, the current inversion is less the result of middle-aged people changing their minds than of young adults expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents. The demographic changes that have taken place in America over the past generation--the increased propensity to remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the much later age at first marriage for those who do marry, the smaller size of families for those who have children, and, at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their sixties, seventies, and eighties--have combined virtually all of the significant elements that make a demographic inversion not only possible but likely. We are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings can live wherever they want, and many will choose central cities over distant suburbs. As they do this, others will find themselves forced to live in less desirable places--now defined as those further from the center of the metropolis. And, as this happens, suburbs that never dreamed of being entry points for immigrants will have to cope with new realities. It should come as no surprise that the most intense arguments about hiring and educating the undocumented have occurred in the relatively distant reaches of American suburbia, such as Prince William County, Virginia.
The reality of demographic inversion strikes me every time I return to Chicago, the city in which I was born and grew up. My grandfather arrived there in 1889, found his way to the Near West Side, and opened a tailor shop that remained in business for 50 years. During that time, the neighborhood was a compact and somewhat culturally isolated enclave of Jewish and Italian families. (It was also the location of Hull House and the original home of the Chicago Cubs.) The building that housed my grandfather's store was torn down in the 1960s when the University of Illinois built its Chicago campus in the neighborhood. The street corner where the store stood now houses part of the university science complex.
The UIC campus is, to my eyes, one of the ugliest in America. But I have made my peace with that. What interests me is what is going on all around that neighborhood, now called University Village. For a while after the school was built, its environs were a sort of residential no-man's-land, dangerous at night and unattractive to the young academics who taught there. Today, assistant professors at UIC generally don't live there either, but for a different reason: They can't afford it. Demand for the townhouses and condominiums on the Near West Side has priced junior faculty out of the market. One can walk a couple of blocks down the street from where my grandfather's shop once stood and order a steak for $24.
You might respond that there is nothing especially noteworthy in this. A college setting, liberal academics, houses close to the city's cultural attractions: That's garden-variety gentrification. What else would you expect?
If you feel that way, you might want to ride an elevated train going northwest, to the lesser-known Logan Square, a few miles beyond the Loop. Whatever Logan Square might be, it is not downtown chic. It is a moderately close-in nineteenth-century neighborhood with a history fairly typical for a city that A.J. Liebling once called "an endless succession of factory-town main streets." Logan Square was developed primarily by Scandinavian manufacturers, who lived on the tree-lined boulevards while their workers, many of them Polish, rented the cottages on the side streets. By the 1970s, nearly all the Poles had decamped for suburbia, and they were replaced by an influx of Puerto Ricans. The area became a haven for gangs and gang violence, and most of the retail shopping that held the community together disappeared.
Logan Square is still not the safest neighborhood in Chicago. There are armed robberies and some killings on its western fringe, and, even on the quiet residential streets, mothers tell their children to be home before dark. But that hasn't prevented Logan Square from changing dramatically again--not over the past generation, or the past decade, but in the past five years. The big stone houses built by the factory owners on Logan Boulevard are selling for nearly $1 million, despite the housing recession. The restaurant that sits on the square itself sells goat cheese quesadillas and fettuccine with octopus, and attracts long lines of customers who drive in from the suburbs on weekend evenings. To describe what has happened virtually overnight in Logan Square as gentrification is to miss the point. Chicago, like much of America, is rearranging itself, and the result is an entire metropolitan area that looks considerably different from what it looked like when this decade started.
Of course, demographic inversion cannot be a one-way street. If some people are coming inside, some people have to be going out. And so they are--in Chicago as in much of the rest of the country. During the past ten years, with relatively little fanfare and surprisingly little press attention, the great high-rise public housing projects that defined squalor in urban America for half a century have essentially disappeared. In Chicago, the infamous Robert Taylor Homes are gone, and the equally infamous Cabrini-Green is all but gone. This has meant the removal of tens of thousands of people, who have taken their Section 8 federal housing subsidies and moved to struggling African American neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. Some have moved to the city's southern suburbs--small suburbs such as Dixmoor, Robbins, and Harvey, which have been among the poorest communities in metropolitan Chicago. At the same time, tens of thousands of immigrants are coming to Chicago every year, mostly from various parts of Latin America. Where are they settling? Not in University Village. Some in Logan Square, but fewer every year. They are living in suburban or exurban territory that, until a decade ago, was almost exclusively English-speaking, middle-class, and white.
There are responsible critics who look at all this and see a lot being made out of very little. They argue that, in absolute numbers, the return to the urban center remains a minor demographic event. They have a point. In most metropolitan areas, in the first few years of the twenty-first century, many more people have moved to the suburbs than have moved downtown. A city of half a million that can report a downtown residential population of 25,000--5 percent of the total--can claim that it is doing relatively well. Charlotte, for all the local excitement it has generated about upscale in-town living, still has no more than about 12,000 residents downtown. Moreover, these 12,000 are not representative of the area's populace; there are few families with school-age children. Downtown Charlotte is mostly attracting the familiar gentrification cohort: singles, couples, older people whose children have left home. The bulk of the married-with-children middle-class has not only been living in the suburbs, it has been moving to the suburbs. Joel Kotkin, perhaps the most prominent of the downtown debunkers, declares flatly that, until families begin turning up in significant numbers on downtown streets, we are talking about a blip rather than a major cultural phenomenon.
But it's not just a blip. The evidence from most American cities--carefully presented by Christopher Leinberger, the real estate developer and University of Michigan urban planning professor, in his recent book, The Option of Urbanism--suggests that the number of downtown residents these days depends more on supply than demand. Few in Charlotte dispute that, if there were 30,000 upscale residential units in the center of that city, there would be 30,000 people living in them before long. The residential population of lower Manhattan has not just increased substantially since 2001; it has all but exploded in the last 18 months. And the strollers have reached Wall Street. Take a walk down there some Saturday morning, and you will see for yourself.
But, even if the critics are mostly right--even if the vast majority of cities never see a downtown residential boom of massive proportions--there is no doubt that a demographic inversion, in which the rich are moving inside and the poor are moving outside, is taking place. The crucial issue is not the number of people living downtown, although that matters. The crucial issue is who they are, and the ways in which urban life is changing as a result.
What would a post-inversion American city look like? In the most extreme scenario, it would look like many of the European capitals of the 1890s. Take Vienna, for example. In the mid-nineteenth century, the medieval wall that had surrounded the city's central core for hundreds of years was torn down. In its place there appeared the Ringstrasse, the circle of fashionable boulevards where opera was sung and plays performed, where rich merchants and minor noblemen lived in spacious apartments, where gentlemen and ladies promenaded in the evening under the gaslights, where Freud, Mahler, and their friends held long conversations about death over coffee and pastry in sidewalk cafes. By contrast, if you were part of the servant class, odds were you lived far beyond the center, in a neighborhood called Ottakring, a concentration of more than 30, 000 cramped one- and two-bedroom apartments, whose residents--largely immigrant Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes--endured a long horse-car ride to get to work in the heart of the city.
Paris was a different story. It had always had a substantial inner-city working class, the breeding ground for political unrest and violence over and over again in French history. But the narrow streets that housed the Parisian poor were largely obliterated in the urban redesign dictated by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The Paris that Haussmann created was the city of fashionable inner-ring boulevards that remains largely intact a century and a half later. The poor and the newly arrived were essentially banished to the suburbs--where they remain today, though they are now mostly Muslims from North Africa rather than peasants from the south of France.
Nobody in his right mind would hold up the present-day arrangement of metropolitan Paris, with its thousands of unemployed immigrants seething in shoddily built suburban high-rise housing projects, as a model for what twenty-first-century urbanism ought to look like. Indeed, in the worst case, demographic inversion would result in the poor living out of sight and largely forgotten in some new kind of high-rise projects beyond the city border, with the wealthy huddled in gated enclaves in the center. But I think this is an unlikely scenario. The people who are moving to the downtowns of American cities today are doing so in part to escape the real or virtual "gated-ness" of suburban life. The condos that house them in the coming years may feature elaborate security systems, but the inhabitants will not be walled off from the street. They want to be in contact with the street. Nor do we have to worry about the return of the idea of warehousing the poor in vertical Corbusian ghettoes. That is one beast we have managed to slay.
Less dystopian are the prophecies of Leinberger, who believes that a dramatic increase in middle-class central-city population will in fact take place, and that one consequence will be the deterioration of today's car-dependent, suburban tract homes into the slums of 2030. I don't think this will happen either, at least not in such extreme form. There simply are not enough lofts and town-houses to double or triple the number of people living in the center of a mid-sized American city. As the central-city population continues to grow, so will the demand for skyscrapers--something cities are sure initially to resist. Nor does it seem likely that exurbia will turn into a wasteland. The price of the houses will go down and render them more attractive for newcomers trying to rise in the U.S. economy and society. Urbanists have complained for years that immigrants and poor people in the inner city have a hard time commuting to the service jobs that are available to them in the suburbs. If they live in the suburbs, they will be closer to the jobs. Transportation will remain a problem, but not one that can't be solved.
Somewhere in between, there lies the vision of Jane Jacobs, who idealized the Greenwich Village of the 1950s and the casual everyday relationships that made living there comfortable, stimulating, and safe. Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in. And, by and large, I believe central cities will give it to them. Not only that, but much of suburbia, in an effort to stay afloat, will seek to urbanize itself to some extent. That reinvention is already taking place: Look at all the car-created suburbs built in the 1970s and '80s that have created "town centers" in the past five years, with sidewalks and as much of a street grid as they can manage to impose on a faded strip-mall landscape. None of these retrofit efforts look much like a real city. But they are a clue to the direction in which we are heading.
In the 1990s, a flurry of academics and journalists (me among them) wrote books lamenting the decline of community and predicting that it would reappear in some fashion in the new century. I think that is beginning to happen now in the downtowns of America, and I believe, for all its imperfections and inequalities, that the demographic inversion ultimately will do more good than harm. We will never return--nor would most of us want to return--to the close-knit but frequently constricting form of community life that prevailed 50 years ago. But, as we rearrange ourselves in and around many of our big cities, we are groping toward the new communities of the twenty-first century.
Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing Magazine and author of The United States of Ambition and The Lost City.
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This article originally ran in the August 13, 2008 issue of the magazine.
84 comments
Missing from this excellent piece is a discussion of education options in the cities. I live right near 14th and U St. in DC and many upper middle class families like mine are raising kids and the one thing that could make us move out to the 'burbs is schools. Some, like us, have started our own charter schools. Demographic shifts don't happen immediately. You need pioneers, people who are willing to accept racial and income diversity, people who see trash, rats, and crime and imagine it improving over 5, 10 years, people who will start their own schools if they don't already exist. Most "gentrification" started with gay singles and couples, followed by young couples with no kids or just starting families. The neighborhood pioneers are racially diverse, often racially mixed, but well off. It will be a very long while before wealthy suburbanites "flee" to the city.
- dc resident
July 28, 2008 at 2:28am
Outstanding piece of work! I'm a resident of Pittsburgh, a Rust Belt City going through a nearly identical process as those you mention in Chicago and Charolette, though in a slower form. Old neighborhoods in the city that used to be close to the steel mills have become close to the new educational, technological, and entertainment-oriented development that have charicterized the city during my lifetime (I'm 18 now). Even in downtown Pittsburgh, though the retail industry still suffers, there have been signs of upscale living and residential development. The hole in the middle of the doughnut of urban America is starting to fill.
- Alex
July 28, 2008 at 9:53am
As an artist who grew up in manhattan in the 50's and still manages to live there I am astonished as to how wrong headed and self congratulatory this article is. What made New York as culturally rich as it was, was that it was possible to live in manhattan if you were poor. It was also possible to partake fully in the culture of NY because the cost was not prohibitive. It is what made NY a magnet for artists of all kinds. This is no longer the case. There are no longer cheap spaces for artists and musicians. A kind of economic pacification has taken place, and the result is the economically well off stare at each other in upscale restaurants and the city is on the way to becoming a cultural vacant lot.
- pontormo
July 28, 2008 at 11:40am
Great article. If anything, I would give transportation a more central place in this puzzle. Recently I was at a GIS workshop in Somerville MA (a suburb of Boston, but also a city in its own right) and someone had overlaid a map of walking routes to transit with property value assessments. There's a protected walkway that cuts through town leading to the downtown Davis Square Red Line station, and it was startling to see that parcels facing directly onto the walkway are worth hundreds of thousands more than parcels just a few yards away without this convenience. You can see the opposite end of this phenomenon out in Central California (my original home) where 3000 sq ft tract homes have been sprouting like weeds. But as the foreclosure blight washes over this cash crop and prices rapidly drop through the floor, wonder who's going to end up living out there? Whether you call it 'smart development' or 'urban sprawl', land use planning often ends up serving very different populations than intended.
- George W
July 28, 2008 at 1:33pm
Pontormo has a point about New York. One of the reasons Chicago has gone through the roof culturally in the last 25 years is that it's still possible to be an artist there. Rents are a fraction of what they are in NY. Mind you, the people I know in Chicago are beginning to feel the squeeze, but it's nothing like what's happened in New York. The result: a substantial proportion of the best-received shows in New York this year originated in Chicago.
- Jeff
July 28, 2008 at 6:03pm
I think that the real issue is that rich and poor people very rarely live together; who'se in the suburbs and who'se in the center really doesn't matter much. The issue of service sector suburban jobs being out of reach for poor people isn't solved by this transition, because the service sector jobs follow the rich. Likewise, the desire for grit, culture and excitement isn't much satisfied by a shift into the city center that pushes out all of the poor people. Segregation by income is going to happen whenever rich people prefer living with other rich people or are indifferent, since people tend to share economic considerations of rent and travel time with others of the same income level. Thus the only real way that American cities are going to fundamentally change is if the American middle class takes a liking to porrer people and creates heterogenous suburbs and centers.
- Jorgen
July 28, 2008 at 7:13pm
I am a young urban elite. Almost. I am interning in Chicago for the summer and am still a student. Anyway, I chose Logan Square for the summer because I knew nothing about Chicago and took the cheapest one. I am glad I did. The dynamics in this article are at least some what apparent. In Wicker Park the culture is hipster, and Lincoln Park is the same thing. Basically, it is the kids who grew up in the burbs. Mostly white. I am white, and I met a guy here who I am now dating, and sometimes I feel like we just stare at each other in upscale restaraunts. Pontormo is insightful. But I think it is a good thing for America. The artists can live freely in the burbs, trapped in a habitat so much of their work used to be based off of. The can then begin to disect and portray city life as cookie cutter, white, blah blah.
- Carter
July 28, 2008 at 7:40pm
As a Canadian, I'm pleased to see the lengthy comment on Vancouver. However, I'm puzzled that you would make reference to Jane Jacobs, and not mention her long-time home,Toronto. This city is a perfect example of your "inversion". The condo market has been berserk in the last decade, as young software engineers, medical researchers, and other skilled people enjoy living and working in the hothouse environment of downtown Toronto.
- Brian Boake
July 29, 2008 at 9:47am
Great article and one that I would like to see further expanded on with perhaps a few more follow ups. It would also be great if more visuals were included to help folks picture what form this transformation is taking place and how various cities are responding to this re-urbanization of their cities. On my last return to my hometown Denver, I keep finding new infill projects that vary in scale and scope throughout the downtown area, LODO, the Highlands and Five Points neighborhoods. I'm excited to see that many of the neglected first-ring suburbs and city neighborhoods are experiencing not only a renaissance but an influx of families that are committed to investing in the communities and neighborhood schools. I also think that municipalities have to have a regional plan that maps out where concentrated growth and redevelopment occurs in the second-ring suburbs that have experienced not only a decline in quality of life due to commute times but also the dearth of services beyond the strip Mall. The Denver metro region has managed to get all the municipalities to start rezoning areas around the expanding light rail stations to outer suburbs like Littleton, Arvada and Westminster which will lead to these suburbs into rethinking how they reinvest and develop denser commercial and business centers, mixed-use development and mixed-density housing beyond the single-use zoning and planning that has dominated planning and zoning boards for decades. I think the "typical American suburb" will become an anachronism in the next few decades as transit oriented development and mixed-use development shapes and informs these once bedroom communities into thriving small urban centers.
- singlespeed
July 29, 2008 at 11:09am
Well, artists CAN still live in NYC, just now it is above 96th st, or over in Brooklyn. To whine about such things is to ignore the history of artistic conclaves in this city over time. Rent Control is one factor, and arguments can be made both ways. There is little cheap housing here, most of it seems to be in the hands of people like Charlie Rangel and Gov Patterson. The rent system itself is unfair to ALL new arrivals. if you have been here since the 50's be thankful. New business kids used to be able to get walk-up studios on the UES, now they are in Hoboken.
- twakum
July 29, 2008 at 11:31am
I grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee. By chance I purchased a house on the inner north west side of town in 1979 and I'm still there. I'd love to move downtown where all the action is but I have 2 problems: (1) it costs a lot and I want to retire in a few years. (2) it's almost impossible to find a place with a yard large enough for 3 medium sized dogs. So as I approach retirement, I'm watching for rural communities that are facing a financial crisis of the loss of a dominant employer. So military base closings and mill closings in the boondocks is where I want to go; someplace cheap with lots of space.
- Greg
July 29, 2008 at 12:48pm
"The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century." Perhaps, however Mr. Ehrenhalt my experience living in Chicago, also a Chicago native, is that in many areas of the city there has been a reemergence of merchant owned shops versus the shuttering of the same I recall from my youth in the late 70's throught the 80's. Most people my fiance and I know rarely if ever shop and big-box stores. We do most of our shopping at nearby stores, or for large items often online. Our time is too valuable to waste driving to the nearest Target or Best-Buy.
- aba
July 29, 2008 at 1:43pm
What the article doesn't discuss is why Vancouver is different from US cities. The real reason people want to live in Vancouver is because it's very libertine realative to a US city. The age of consent is 14, bars are open till morning, sushi on a rotating barge of boats(kaiten style), hardbodied Japanese, HK, and Korean girls, nighclubs, non prosecution pot laws, cheap electricity....simply formula. Concentrate all that stuff at over 13,000 people per m2 and even St. Louis could turn around.
- reilly
July 29, 2008 at 3:24pm
When I lived in the NY's East Village as a struggling musician and filmmaker, those of us without money but with arty, "edgy" fashion forward hipster cache sneered at the weekend "bridge and tunnel" crowds coming in from Jersey and outer boroughs. I suppose the kids in Hoboken and the Bronx still sneer at the bridge and tunnel crowd, only now, they're go out from Manhattan!
- Eric
July 29, 2008 at 5:14pm
Agreed, aba. With all this in-depth discussion of the reemergence of downtown as a demographic shift, why ignore the same shift in consumer power? The young, especially middle-class and above, do not go out to their nearest Wal-Mart anymore. In fact, I would venture to say one of the main reasons downtown is such a particularly exciting option is the thrill, and the gas-saving possibilities, of being able to walk down the street and pick up the things you need at a place owned by people, just like me, who are struggling to make it here, too.
- Amie
July 29, 2008 at 5:29pm
Another big reason for the success of Vancouver's downtown: a mandate that a certain percentage of downtown condos have more than two bedrooms, which encourages families with children--and extended families with single parents as well. It's really difficult to find 3 bedrooms or more in any of the new developments, be they in LA or Charlotte or even urbane Portland.
- SD Dan
July 29, 2008 at 5:37pm
This is an intersting article. One major problem that makes it difficult for young couples to remain in the downtown area is the lack of condos for families. If you have 2 or 3 kids, it is tough to find an affordable 3 or 4 bedroom unit. This process will only continue if developers wake up and realize that there is a demand for family housing in downtown areas. At the same time, young couples will need to push for increased housing options.
- JEA
July 29, 2008 at 5:42pm
I very much appreciated this article, but I am surprised it glossed over a common complaint of many urban dwellers: families are pushing out nightlife. Where the stroller goes, the nightclub flees. In Manhattan, couples with children are moving into nightlife districts, areas known for exciting rock clubs and dance venues. The new residents (perhaps unaware that they were moving into apartments above decades-old dance clubs) complain about the noise, the clubs get shut down, and the appeal of the area disappears. The same goes for every aspect of street life that thrives on a childless culture: street vendors, sex shops, art galleries, etc. If Manhattan wants to remain a cultural mecca, it would do well to limit the power of the stroller drivers and their attempts to turn everything they touch into a "child safe" environment.
- JDK
July 29, 2008 at 8:06pm
it seems a longer term trend is the move to smaller cities all over the country. smaller cities generally have a superior quality of life yet many are quite vibrant. in the knowledge economy, many people can work from anywhere and they are choosing smaller cities with quality-of-life amenities in Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas and everywhere else. there is no longer any need for urban life to be concentrated in a few dozen large cities.
- reader101
July 30, 2008 at 12:38am
I beg to differ on the central tenets of this article. Particularly on the assumption that the rich 'gentry' are the culturally active elites. These often predatory bookkeepers and businessmen certainly are not the cultural elites. Neither in America nor in Europe. I live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Except for the historic canals area, most 19th century neighbourhoods of the city have been inhabited by workers and the well-educated non-affluent elites 'doing their thing'. The demise of the harbour has left many empty warehouses and factories. These became occupied by poor artists from all over the planet. These people have to courage and imagination to listen to modern classical music rather than Mozart or Beethoven. The harbour area now has one of the largest centres for modern music in Europe. It is true that it attracts rich kids and young adults from the suburbs on the run for consumerism and existential meaninglessness that is so prevalent in much of modern American life. Equating affluence and civilization is clearly wrong.
- Johan Sterk
July 30, 2008 at 6:17am
JDK accurately describes the typical effect of today's protective parents upon cosmopolitan city environments. It's interesting to note that, for Jane Jacobs, one of the central concerns of her analysis of life in the Village was to explain, and save, the compatability of child-rearing with urban life. For example, she offers a brilliant analysis of the benefits of wide sidewalks. It would be interesting to consider whether the combination of kids and cosmopolites was already under strain in her day, or whether it was, and remains, possible to strike a sustainable balance between the two.
- Morrow
July 30, 2008 at 2:06pm
If wealth migrates toward the center city and the poor and recent immigrants settle in the burbs how can u be sure that the service jobs will stay in the burbs? Seems like the affluent city dwellers will prefer to enjoy their service amenities nearby (department stores, even big box stores)so the less well off will still have to face the same challenge of getting to distant service jobs, but just in reverse since those new jobs will be in the city. So we're facing the same problem of transportation equity and underdeveloped public transport..
- cd
July 30, 2008 at 2:14pm
Before people jump to conclusions like families and the childless are in conflict in urban space, I think we'd do well to remember that we in the US currently have no really mature urban culture. We've forgotten what it is over the past century. It seems short sighted to conclude that loud musical venues where drunken singles swap herpes virus is the main litmus test for having a successful urban culture. Clearly that's all that was left in OUR urban cultures of the past 60 years, but that doesn't mean that's the best we can do. This article points to the beginnings of new urban culture; there's lots more to do. The high prices in Manhattan and elsewhere could be seen simply as indications that this nation doesn't yet have urban housing for a large population. If that is remedied in coming decades, this urbanization could easily continue and return vibrancy across the spectrum to US cities. We've been so badly waylaid for decades by the commercial interests (the big 3 car makers and other large corporations concerned with one model - consumption that optimizes their size and profit), we still have no idea in this country how we really want to live, it seems to me. I'm one of those raised in the burbs in the 70s and 80s who now can't stand them. Seems like there is something in this new urbanism to me.
-
July 30, 2008 at 3:07pm
Alan, I was with you until the very end, and your panglossian take on the future of suburbia. You assume that suburbs will gradually adjust to this deluge of new Americans and the urban poor. This ignores the worldview of many who moved to the suburbs one and two generations ago - they intended to create a safe space for themselves and their families. The very point was to get away from the poor and make them someone else's problem. As such, these same people and their communities are viewing this "new suburbanism" and the concomitant decline in their perceived quality of life with dismay. Further, economically, these communities are far less well equipped to deal with this demographic change than the cities were with middle class migration in the 1960's and 70's. Most suburban areas are a patchwork of villages, towns and counties that raise money largely from their property tax base. An influx of the poor will burden limited local services and lower the property tax base. Given all this, I would expect many of the affluent will retreat to city centers, wealthy suburban or exurban enclaves, leaving other areas to go into decline.
- Dennis
July 30, 2008 at 6:23pm
this article is missing a hard look at a solution to those poor people who are moving to the ghetturbs. As the separation between the classes becomes more extreme the burgeoning if not supple police state will, as history shows, defend the rich and their property from the lives of poor people. The poor are not migrating, they are vacating, forced out by predatory bankers and landlords,food and transportation costs, job acquisition and retention, a livable wage, health insurance and so many other economic challenges. When the rich get richer and the poor get poorer on the scale the Bush/Cheney clowns have taken it we, Americans, are fast entering third world territory. With the dollar dropping and inflation getting worse those big luxury lofts with their big dumb LUXURY LOFT banners hanging from them are akin to H2Dummers, unsustainable BLOATED examples of an outdated era of excess. Heating an 8000 square foot glass box with 12 foot ceilings for a young couple is absurd. A whole neighborhood of that type of lifestyle is almost czarist in its stark conflict with the street below. The long term solution for the poor to rise up to a decent standard of living is education, jobs, livable wage, equitable taxation, tenants rights, civil rights an end to the prison industrial complex and a balancing of the courts and laws currently stacked against them. if the playing field were leveled the urban migrations would be less stark and the wealthy would have to wait their turn just like everybody else.
- bill
July 31, 2008 at 3:40pm
This is an excellent piece--in content and in the way it was relayed. While I think a discussion on transportation to-and-from the city requires its own investigation and subsequent feature in TNR, I have to wonder about cities built more like Los Angeles, where there is not "heart", per se. You bring up Detroit in one section, and I think you are onto something: being the dilapidated sprawl-mare that it is, and with arguably the worst metropolitan economy in the US right now (or at least exemplary of), the resurrection of the Motor City will need much more than a simple demographic inversion. Perhaps this is the distinction: cities with a heart (NYC, Atlanta, Denver) will experience a renaissance with the help of demographic inversion, while "cities" consisting of an amalgam of townships will continue to be in decline.
- dylanposer
August 1, 2008 at 4:11pm
I agree with you about New York City, but this is not the case in Chicago where economic diversity and a reasonable cost of living have helped the city's cultural life thrive. Back in New York this summer I was disheartened to see many off broadway theaters shuttered for the summer. This is not the case in Chicago where the city is THE place to be in the summer. I guess in NYC many resident customers go to the Hamptons or New Jersey. It seems a cultural wasteland aside from the Disney-esque Broadway and corporate funded institutions like MOMA and MET etc. Very sad to see a lack of cultural vibrancy in one of the greatest cities in the world.
- bigjersey
August 1, 2008 at 4:37pm
- petebecj
August 2, 2008 at 8:25am
At the first opportunity... In this period, and in its true light, the sound of a picture forgets and emotion in the care of a faith; a candle reappears, a delicate silence remembers a river and then, at the first opportunity, I'll love you my darling..... Francesco Sinibaldi
- Francesco Sinibaldi
August 2, 2008 at 4:23pm
One quick addition to the comments on Vancouver: it doesn't expand because it can't expand. Vancouver's development is dictated by geography: it is sandwiched between the North shore mountains, the Strait of Georgia and the Fraser River. The downtown is built on a small peninsula connected to a somewhat larger one which holds Vancouver and Burnaby. The rest of the suburbs are either built on the river delta to the south (Delta, Richmond and Surrey) or extend up the Fraser Valley. There's very little flat land.
- jrochest
August 3, 2008 at 12:00am
Ehrenhalt's article seems almost quaint, from the perspective of this long-time resident of one of Toronto's many downtown neighbourhoods. The flight to the inner city is so well established here that someone moving to the burbs is remarkable enough to occasion a story in The Globe and Mail interviewing them at length about how they have discovered a neighbourhood with many of the virtues of life downtown. In many downtown neighbourhoods a major source of conversation and complaint are the congestion problems caused by flocks of mothers with strollers crowding sidewalks, cafes and shops. One emerging trend: retired people moving downtown to be close to their children and grandchildren.
- Arthur Johnson
August 3, 2008 at 6:38am
Wait a minute. There were 4,315,000 born in the US last year, a record. The population is increasing at about 30 million a decade. This incredible growth can't be stuffed exclusively into urban centers. What's really happening is the growth of once-small cities towns in the South and West into much larger entities. I live in Nevada, and our population has increased nearly 80% THIS DECADE, and is projected to near-double in the next 20 years. Similar stories in other Western states.
- adam
August 3, 2008 at 12:13pm
There's nothing that would make me happier than a resurgence of merchant-owned shops. I was making a generalization about the overall commrical scene. But if I underestimated the small-scale revival, I'm delighted to be wrong.
- Alan Ehrenhalt
August 3, 2008 at 2:24pm
Well, it seems to depend on which smaller cities you're talking about. Ann Arbor, yes. Flint, no. Boulder, yes. Youngstown, no. www.flintexpats.com
- geewhy
August 4, 2008 at 1:33am
It's funny how few numbers there are in this piece. I grew up in Chicago, and I lived at 9th and U in DC, just a few significant blocks (mine still had crack-cocaine out the wazoo) from the area described. Regarding Logan Square: The author describes the price of houses on the square itself -- but fails to mention that housing in the area is still relatively affordable, that the majority of people living there are still working and lower- (as in not rich) middle-class Hispanics, and that while Logan Square is gentrifying, it's doing so pretty darned slowly compared to DC, as a walk down Milwaukee Ave will tell you. A handful of yuppy restaurants on a single block don't make a case. Numbers do. On that note, I saw precious little reference to the fact that the housing market has crashed, a factor that may preserve Milwaukee Ave. in all its blue-collar grit for some time. The author continues: "To describe what has happened virtually overnight in Logan Square as gentrification is to miss the point. Chicago, like much of America, is rearranging itself, and the result is an entire metropolitan area that looks considerably different from what it looked like when this decade started." Logan Square did not change overnight - there's been a burgeoning middle-class white scene there for decades -- and the "entire metropolitan area" of Chicago does not look different. In the last ten years, some parts of some neighborhoods have undergone radical changes. Most visible changes, though, have been gradual, and places like Lincoln Park gentrified long ago. That's not news. Then there's the assertion that the young gentry-to-be can't get by without cars -- a fact gleaned, apparently, from a few people the author spoke to on the street. I never owned a car while living in DC, and neither did most of the people I knew - all of us young, upwardly mobile (though not all white, thank you). Perhaps asking a few token young people on the corner isn't the most statistically significant approach to understanding the niceties of gentrification. This is a late, lugubrious plod through well-tilled soil. Gentrification IS interesting - but how about getting off one's duff and doing some research, other than than standing on a few corners and waxing philosophical. You never know - the results might not be yesterday's news.
- Isaiah
August 4, 2008 at 2:57am
It's funny how few numbers there are in this piece. I grew up in Chicago, and I lived at 9th and U in DC, just a few significant blocks (mine still had crack-cocaine out the wazoo) from the area described. Regarding Logan Square: The author describes the price of houses on the square itself -- but fails to mention that housing in the area is still relatively affordable, that the majority of people living there are still working and lower- (as in not rich) middle-class Hispanics, and that while Logan Square is gentrifying, it's doing so pretty darned slowly compared to DC, as a walk down Milwaukee Ave will tell you. A handful of yuppy restaurants on a single block don't make a case. Numbers do. On that note, I saw precious little reference to the fact that the housing market has crashed, a factor that may preserve Milwaukee Ave. in all its blue-collar grit for some time. The author continues: "To describe what has happened virtually overnight in Logan Square as gentrification is to miss the point. Chicago, like much of America, is rearranging itself, and the result is an entire metropolitan area that looks considerably different from what it looked like when this decade started." Logan Square did not change overnight - there's been a burgeoning middle-class white scene there for decades -- and the "entire metropolitan area" of Chicago does not look different. In the last ten years, some parts of some neighborhoods have undergone radical changes. Most visible changes, though, have been gradual, and places like Lincoln Park gentrified long ago. That's not news. Then there's the assertion that the young gentry-to-be can't get by without cars -- a fact gleaned, apparently, from a few people the author spoke to on the street. I never owned a car while living in DC, and neither did most of the people I knew - all of us young, upwardly mobile (though not all white, thank you). Perhaps asking a few token young people on the corner isn't the most statistically significant approach to understanding the niceties of gentrification. This is a late, lugubrious plod through well-tilled soil. Gentrification IS interesting - but how about getting off one's duff and doing some research, other than than standing on a few corners and waxing philosophical. You never know - the results might not be yesterday's news.
- Isaiah
August 4, 2008 at 2:59am
I bought my first home in Buffalo 3 years ago, because it's cheaper then the burbs. Now a lot of people are starting to move downtown to condos. A decent amout of vacant buildings are being developed as condo/stores/offices. Yes urban developement in downtown Buffalo, Hell has frozen over.
- Darrell
August 4, 2008 at 11:35pm
Excellent comments. The good thing is that change is inevitable. I love the fact that cities morph into new experiences. If culture is leaving Manhattan and moving to Chicago, I say move to Chicago if that's what you are looking for. The great thing is whatever your lifestyle, there is a place to suit you - suburban or urban. For me, I prefer Paris - for some reason it's rhthym and pace suit me. Chicago sounds like fun though, I was born there, haven't been back in a while. I better go check it out, thanks for the tip.
- guillone
August 5, 2008 at 12:37am
The Edgewater neighborhood as well as Rogers Park have changed significantly in the last 10-15 years. A lot of the dilapidated buildings have been torn down and luxury low and high rises have replaced them. The author already mentioned UIC...It seems to me that a lot more of the northside and near west side neighborhoods have improved and been gentrified. Although, closer to North Lawndale and further south and west of that, commercial and residential developments are moving more slowly, but it is still happening. You are right though when you state that Logan Square is still a blue-collared community, but that is changing as well. There are a lot more of the yuppies in Logan Square; they just appear to be more "green---" and perhaps that's why you don't notice them as much. Perhaps, because you are younger, you see and read an older person's perceptions differently and therefore you judge that he had not done enough research. On a different topic, many immigrants also have moved to the North Lawndale area, west of Pilsen, west of Western because it is more affordable. I used to live there and I have a friend who told me that a lot more diverse group of residents have moved into the area --- she noticed them on the California station of the Pink Line. I recently visited her and have noticed a lot of positive changes such as a big, clean supermarket selling fresh produce and other grocery items called Pete's Market and a Staples opened there. Some people might look down on the big box retail stores, but these stores indicate that progress is moving their way, toward their poor community. This means more jobs and better community services for all those who live there.
- DL
August 5, 2008 at 1:34am
Demographic inversion has been going on in San Francisco for some time now. As richer people moved into the city, the artists, working class and poor people moved out. Many artists & musicians moved to Alameda, and there is a thriving art scene there. Many poor people moved to nearby small towns, brought in by teaser loans and a chance to escape the inner-city crime. Unfortunately, dense pockets of poor people in these small towns are straining the social resources and increasing crime. It's a feedback loop. Wealthy people now avoid those towns, making them poorer, and making them more attractive to poor people, etc. As goes California so goes the Nation ...
- Justin
August 5, 2008 at 1:34am
Fabulous to read this article, because the transformation of the inner city is happening on a smaller scale in Ogden, Utah. Destined to be THE premiere outdoor recreation capital of the world, Ogden's inner city has been filled with blighted homes for the past 20 years or so, despite the fact that it is a National Historic Register distric with over 3700 eligible historic homes. Our Historic 25th Street downtown is full of character and new businesses; the 80's-era mall was torn down and a new high-adventure recreation center established; the Ogden Raptors (L.A.Dodger farm team) entertain us all summer; and world-class skiing at Snowbasin and Powder Mountain are 20 minutes away in the winter...and the FrontRunner commuter train now takes us to Salt Lake City... without the car. The families moving into the inner city are looking forward to having their own affordable historic home, walking to amenities downtown, sitting on their front porches and talking with neighbors. It is an exciting time to watch the positive effects of gentrification and is comforting knowing that Ogden is reflecting the trend of large metro areas. Gotta love it! www.suewilkerson.com
- Sue Wilkerson
August 5, 2008 at 1:22pm
I lived near 14th and U in DC in the early and mid 90's and I am seeing the same process that I saw there while I was in college take place in nyc (well it's pretty much finished) and in my hometown Newark. First you get overly aggressive police force to harrass the people who have lived there for years and then they take the buildings with cheap rent "redecorate" them and slap $1000 dollars onto the rent so that it only becomes affordable to outsiders. I went to U st a few years ago and it resembled nothing of what I remember. It had a active nightlife back then, the only thing that has changed is the population. NYC killed the nightclub and you can't go anywhere without finding a cop to make sure that you are being a well behaved citizen. Theres always a feeling that you are being watched and even if you aren't doing anything illegal it is annoying as hell. But change is constant.
- Richard
August 5, 2008 at 4:34pm
"The few available trains coming downtown from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms. ... Today, this could never happen." It could not have happened then either. I can only assume you have never been to Chicago, or are relying on dubious information. Since when would African Americans (or anyone else) not push onto trains, and if necessary push off middle class whites (or other African Americans), if transportation were required? When have you ever observed people to wait for the next train in a snow storm?
- Jeff Perren
August 5, 2008 at 6:38pm
In the last twenty years the population of the US increased by close to 10%, over 20 million people. Compare that demographic change to that of middle class people moving downtown. The latter is a blip of the tragically hip.
- Chris
August 5, 2008 at 7:18pm
Hello, Boston, anyone, Boston? Clearly you've got to visit Boston. Boston has already completed the Demographic Inversion. Many affluent people both LIVE and WORK in the city. As opposed to modern Paris where many affluent live, but most of the office buildings are in the suburbs and outskirts. In Massachusetts, there's nothing to do in the suburbs but drink and watch TV. The lame live in the subrubs, the smart and wealthy and social live in the city. It's called self-selection, those people who are lame choose to live in a place that is lame, they go home at night and only watch TV (and drink) and say why do I spend so much for my condo in the city when they never go out. Those in Boston (or Chicago or Vancouver or Manhattan) want to go out and they meet other people who want to go out and live surrounded by people who want to go out, so those that like to go out self-select to live in the city. Over time... the lame are in the suburbs and the smart and wealthy live in the city. It helps to be smart, because it isn't easy. If you are stupid and slow, the suburbs are much easier.
- Noah Sachs
August 5, 2008 at 7:44pm
I lived for a year in Vancouver's Yaletown (the part with most of the slender condo buildings) and spent two years living in Manhattan's Battery Park City. I enjoyed both, but Yaletown was far better because of its proximity to the "real" downtown - theatres, eateries, nightclubs. Battery Park City is very pleasant, but it is kind of sterile and quiet, especially on weekends, though it has some great parks for youngsters. I grew up in the 'burbs, and spent a lot of my university career commuting by car through Vancouver's constricted traffic, and so I loved living a 10 minute walk from my work or a convenient Subway. All that said, I don't have kids yet, and I wouldn't want to deny my kids (when I have them) the pleasures of playing in a yard or playing street hockey with the neighbors, which is why I still think that I'll be headed to the 'burbs at some point.
- Mike
August 5, 2008 at 8:56pm
I live in Columbia Heights D.C.. I've lived in D.C. since '89, bought a fixer upper in 2000, crack house neighbors, dogs, crime etc. etc. Now 2008, let me tell you this city is changing: bike lanes, Target, good grocery stores, new movie theatres, etc. My car sits for days and days. I have three kids and the only thing that saved me from moving to the wastelands of suburbia was Charter Shools.
I play in a band, and we have gotten about 5 gigs this year to play in Town Centers from Haymarket, VA., Ranson, West Virginia, Pentagon City, Rosslyn and a few more suburban areas. These suburban towns are getting smart and trying to incorporate an urban community sense into their strip malls, like the author stated. It's a good thing, I guess, still have to drive to the strip mall though.
Now the poor in my neighborhood are good for now, due to Section 8 or rent control, but their kids are going to have to move to PG County.
- Leifhaus
August 5, 2008 at 10:40pm
Very interesting article. I agree with some of the other posters here that the author glossed over some details, such as pending changes in transportation and government structure, although these issues could be covered in-depth in future articles. The impact of peak oil production on the US cannot be over-emphasized. Global demand for oil is outstripping supply and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. For a US so dependent on oil to power cars, trucks, planes and virtually every other aspect of its' infrastructure, this ongoing development will be nothing short of devastating, bringing about mass social, political and economic upheaval on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. People will move back into urban centers not simply because it's the hip and cool thing to do now, but because these areas were generally constructed at a time before the victory of the oil-powered automobile over all other forms and considerations of transport. They will move back into the urban cores for reasons of personal survival, because life and survival in most decentralized, car-dependent sprawling suburbs and exurbs will become extremely harsh and difficult, compared to what people now living in these areas have become accustomed to. I also believe that most suburban and exurban governments will break down within the next several years as the real fallout from the mortgage crisis manifests: the end of sprawl as an economic engine and tax base. Most of the newer car-dependent burbs started off decades before the sprawl boom as small farming villages, trade outposts or townships. Most of these places had no major economic activity before the big developers came, promising their trustees truckloads of cash in exchange for farmland and a "partnership" in building up their own little fiefdoms. But now the money has dried up and the oil is running out. The developers have gone bankrupt, the big box stores they built are closing down, and the suburbanites and exurbanites themselves are losing their McHomes. Without tax-paying businesses and households, government breaks down. Most suburbs will fold, perhaps being absorbed back into their counties, the central urban government itself, or some new form of centralized regional government.
- Neo
August 5, 2008 at 11:16pm
I'd like to echo 'warn tnr' and say that this article is poorly researched and for any of its anecdotal evidence one can easily find a counterexample. But the 3rd comment by pontormo really makes the best point. If you want to see really lively urban life, go to Montreal. Not particularly many people live 'downtown' (i think it's about 70k), but probably a good million live in the 'inner city'. Rent is cheap, apartments are big, crime is low, and a diversity of people can live there, while subways and bike paths make everything accessible without the need for cars, though of course some people still have cars because they're useful machines. Downtown proper, on the other hand, is overpriced and soulless. This article plays off a dichotomy of 'suburbs' and 'downtown' and as far as I can tell is cheering for a huge population of rich people to move downtown. That seems silly to me... it would be so expensive, and I think most people like having a reasonable sized walk-up apartment rather than live in a downtown broom closet in a skyscraper. The pendulum has been really far towards huge homes spread far apart. Now it's swinging the other way, but one needn't assume a jump to the opposite extreme.
-
August 6, 2008 at 12:34am
While there is much talk of the center city, I think the street car suburbs in cities like Charlotte are showing the most dramatic changes you are talking about. Neiborhoods that were emptied out because of white flight are seeing property values skyrocket as singles, DINKs (dual income, no kids) are moving back into these areas. These areas are close to the city center and offer the 'character' that people are looking for that can't be found in the new home communites on the urban fringe. I have a majority of people under 40 that I work with (I am a Realtor) that want to live downtown but it is out of young professionals price range that chose to live in as close as they can afford. It will be interesting to see how our cities will look 15 years from now. Great article!
- TEC
August 6, 2008 at 8:35am
this article strikes me as one written to justify an already-existing POV, I'm more impressed with the comments than the article. I live in Logan Square, and it isn't gentrifying rapidly, unless (as a prior poster mentioned) a restaurant or two is all that it takes. The author seems to have confused a short-lived housing-bubble prompted condo-building boom with actual demographic change. Logan Square is still heavily Latino, and in fact there are sizeable numbers of 1st or 2nd generation Polish, as well as Asians (seem to be primarily Filipino and Korean, both of my next door neighbors are Filipino) stretching out from Albany Park. These populations have been there for many decades, and are fully "landed" - if by gentrification we mean an area becoming wealthier, that is certainly happening. If by gentrification we mean white suburban folks transplanting brown urban ones, that's not gonna happen any time soon. The biggest issue affecting how our neighborhood will change is zoning & raw land-prices (which are of course determined by zoning/density allowances). Neighborhoods start to really tip in Chicago when the land becomes more valuable than the houses on top of them - that's when the DIY rehabbers get shut out, and it's when property taxes become so high that long-timers "cash out" as their kids leave home. But more importantly, it's when developers start buying up properties and demolishing them, replacing them with much more expensive ones that are out of reach for the current residents. That's unavoidable to a degree due to the cost of building a home now vs. the cost of upkeeping one that's 100 years old, but in Chicago it's also due to relying on property taxes to fund schools. Having grown up a few miles east in Lake View & having gone to grade school in Lincoln Park, although I can't define it mathematically, I have a pretty good sense for how those neighborhoods gentrified, and it would be IMO unwise to try and extrapolate how they changed upon the rest of the City. In Chicago neighborhoods can vary substantially that are in very close proximity to each other, which I think is great - there's something for everyone here.
- Carter O'Brien
August 6, 2008 at 11:12am
The trains didn't stop at the inner-city stations, they just kept on going. Therefore, nobody could push their way into them
-
August 6, 2008 at 2:18pm
"my guess is that, except in Manhattan, the carless life has yet to achieve any significant traction in the affluent new enclaves of urban America." San Francisco is at least one other town that ought to be mentioned here. I know whole groups of people, of various affluence, who live without cars. Possibly Boston and Philly as well, I know people who live(d) without cars in both places.
- jaggedben
August 6, 2008 at 2:56pm
It is important to make the distinction that Manhattan is not New York, but a part of New York. Manhattan has always occupied a different urban curve than the typical American downtown, one where artists (and, more likely, hangers-on) lived in decaying areas like the East Village through the greater city's financial crises. It is important to make the distinction that Manhattan is not New York. That island has always occupied a different urban curve than the typical American downtown. In Manhattan, artists (and, more likely, hangers-on) lived in decaying areas like the East Village through the greater city's financial crises of the 1960’s and 70’s. More relevant to this artice is Brooklyn, the borough so large that it has always held a diverse demographic spectrum, EXCEPT for the 1970's when it was all but abandoned by the upper middle class who once formed its core. Fast forward to today, when the stroller set has re-colonized Park Slope, Ft. Greene, Cobble Hill and the like. This reveals an important point: can it be called "gentrification" if the housing stock in question is repopulated by the original group it was built to house? From a moral perspective, is a prosperous middle-class family renovating an ornate bourgeois townhouse in Bed-Stuy worse for society than artists fresh out of Oberlin or RISD occupying tenement housing on the Lower East Side? Haven't the artists been displacing the truly poor for decades now? And as for pontormo, unless you're still a starving artist, something tells me you held onto your rent-controlled apartment for far longer than you should have. That is the real reason why young artistic types have not been able to live in Manhattan. When I moved to New York, even before the condo boom of the last decade, cheap apartments were extremely scarce. At the same time I was constantly going to parties at the homes of well-off people in their 40's and 50's living in two bedroom apartments and proudly paying a quarter of the rent I shelled out every month for a tiny studio. They seemed to see it as payment for sticking with the city during its tough times, and that made some sense to me. Still, to lament the lack of the young and artistic while sipping chai in the multi-paned window of your Greenwich Village rental seems a bit self-satisfied, doesn’t it?
- JPo
August 6, 2008 at 3:05pm
I wanted to address a few things: 1. The Slummification of the exurbs is happening today. There are several townhouse communities in the Washington, DC area that have become hotbeds of crime as the original owners rent them out or sell them after 20 years of little repairs. I've seen communities where bored teenagers loiter and smoke around an entrance to a cheap townhouse neighborhood with nothing to walk to and nothing to do. Also included with this reality are exurb houses that sold to immigrants looking to create rooming houses for landscapers and related tradesmen. In my parents wealthy suburb a neighbor across the street turned a million dollar home into what appeared to my eyes to be a flophouse for her landscaping company for a minimum of 6 weeks before the police raided it. Neither the police nor the neighbors were prepared to deal with such odd violations- it took my parents weeks to realize that they were seeing the same 12 men actually LIVE in this property while performing home repairs. 2. The school systems are the #1 impediment to the gentrification of the center city. I absolutely sent my son to our local elementary school with his friends, but 6 members of his class left the school due to an insurmountable problem- the teachers grew up with and were informed by the politics of segregation and the 1968 riots and could not see past those eras even though it was 40 years later. One simply cannot manage a school populated by the children of lawyers, doctors, and artistic yuppies while treating them as if they're the poor downtrodden children with nothing who are lucky to receive ANY education at all. It may sound bizarre, but it took me over 8 months of talking to multiple teachers to understand why they ran their classrooms the way they did. We abandoned that school because the teachers could not even handle our volunteering or the "interference" of the PTA. Literally teachers did not know how to handle my son and his friends bringing in books every day they wanted the teacher to read- to quote her, "Most parents here don't have books in their houses and little Jimmy brings in a new one every day." In a neighborhood where houses sell for $1-1.5 million and condos sell for $500k? We don't own books? Really?
- DCer
August 6, 2008 at 4:08pm
I think the author is slightly remiss in not noting the anti-gentrification movement in the logan square/puerto rican community as it is quite strong and a model for responsible growth.
-
August 6, 2008 at 6:50pm
I'd like to agree with those who indicated how poorly researched this article is. I'd also like to agree with those who indicated how Mr. Ehrenhalt misunderstands the meaning of culture, of poverty, of power, etc.
- lbp
August 7, 2008 at 1:14am
Never mind Vancouver. As was mentioned earlier obviously the author has not been to Toronto(Canada's largest city) in recent years which is now, among other things, the condo capital of North America. Donald Trump is building his first condo/hotel project outside of the US in Toronto(60 stories) There are two 80 story condos in the downtown core being built along with many other types of high and low rise residential buildings. The inner-city population has increased by 65% in the last fifteen years alone even without the forthcoming completion of several of these projects. There are as well a number of co-op communities in the inner city where people of various income levels live in the same complex and pay in accordance with their income and it works out quite well. This would NEVER be acceptable in the US. As with European cities that were not designed for the automobile, the ability to walk along with excellent public transportation systems make for a growing, vibrant and SAFE community. For the most part, America with its sprawling suburbs, paranoia about crime around every corner and gated communities has yet to learn that lesson.
- Ron W
August 7, 2008 at 9:13pm
As a native of Brooklyn, who visits friends and families regularly, and who works in Manhattan, I certainly see the changes occurring in former 'slums.' But I also see major changes that have occurred where I live in the far burbs (about 40 miles from the city). The biggest change has been a huge influx of the people who used to move to gentrified areas of Brooklyn--white, middle class creative professionals (writers, editors, graphic designers, architects, film makers, etc). Every house is bought by a young family leaving Park Slope or the Upper West Side. In the past 5 years this population has boomed, and with it has been a boom in new restaurants, art film houses, gourmet grocery stores, museums, concerts, etc--all the 'urban' amenities and arts that one did not use to find in the burbs. So when I read in this article that the burbs are becoming more like inner cities I scratch my head and wonder where on earth they are talking about.
- westchesterite
August 8, 2008 at 2:04pm
The Vancouver skyline looks like a third world city. Most of their condos are built for the Olympics and most of them are vacant. As a whole, the majority of their new multifamily buildings lack character. I would hate for this to be the fate of American cities.
- seattle
August 8, 2008 at 3:08pm
This comment actually rings much truer than the economic "class" of the city-dwellers. It does not take paying for a play to make the city a cultural center. It takes the off-Broadway and the starving artists to build the industry for the fat cats that are in existence because of all the little people. Also I agree about the less-costly things to do, and the opportunities for the poorer people to at least partake of the culture. It seems that when the poorer housing would be at the outside of the city, then there would be no hope for the people who would need to commute in to find work, it would cost too much to come into the city and the education would not keep up when the real estate appraisal goes down, so does the quality of the teaching (teachers are poorer than some, too).
- K Beckwith
August 8, 2008 at 4:02pm
As a former New York City-ite now dwelling in very rural KY., I think this article was rather shortsighted. The current trend towards reurbanization is an anamoly- it will not last. It is the last gleaning of a bustling economy. As econonomic depression looms; crime and governmental tyranny increase and infrastructure crumbles, more people will do as I did 7 years ago, and seek escape from the artificial and overly expensive man-made environs. They will opt for the freedom and sustenance of cheap rural areas, where they can live very nicely on a small income and not be manipulated by artificial forces, like zoning and planning (which never achieve their desired goals). They will seek a life where instead of being manipulated by government and real-estate developers, they can create their own lifestyle and environment. This trend has already begun, and I believe it will grow exponentially the worse the economy becomes. The former ghettoes of the 70's and 80's where 100 year-old shacks and rowhouses now sell for $400K will quickly revert back to ghettoes as the economy falters and crime increases and infrastructure fails- i.e. a replay of the 70's all over again.
- Richiemagoo
August 10, 2008 at 1:20am
Gtown Law was trying to get students to move to U Street in 1997. Newly arrived from a respectable city in the west, I took one look at the neighborhood and told the "tour guide" I would pass on getting knifed for my Ramen. Ten years later, the neighborhood is almost to the point where I would feel safe, but now I have a family, so I still wouldn't even consider it. I'll go drinking there with the litlle lady, but I'm not going to let my kid wander in that neighborhood. Maybe I'm just not as "hip" as the author.
- Some Law Talking Guy
August 11, 2008 at 2:57pm
Interesting article. I was one of those born-suburbanites who loved living in Chicago (River North, Lincoln Park when our daughter was born). We would have loved to stay in our neighborhood in the city but for three things: high property taxes, crap schools, and the total inability to find a 4BR house for under 1.5 million dollars. You simply will not get a true "inversion" when every family with school-aged kids leaves the neighborhood, or has to shell out $25K+ per year per kid as private school tuition. The city bureaucracy is too entrenched to achieve true school reform; city workers are not about to surrender their cushy jobs to reduce the property tax burden; and the zoning regulations are sufficiently ridiculous that you will not ever, ever get decent yet affordable housing for families in the city center on less than 100K a year. (The house we bought in the burbs is 3x the size of what we could get in the city for a comparable price). Oh, and on the big-box retailers: they will continue to move into established neighborhoods, as has already occurred in areas of Lincoln Park, Bucktown, etc. The city cannot help itself and continues to create a regulatory/property tax climate that kills small business. The mom-and-pop stores or light manufacturing where mom-and-pop bought their building in the 1970s may survive gentrification another 10-15 years. They'll retire when their property tax bills hit 10-20K a year; get their building facades landmarked to retain neighborhood "character"; get more frequent visits from the building inspector, etc. etc. As for the suburbs, the economic segregation is already happening. You can have 500K swings in home values if you are just a few miles apart. Suburbs with 1920-70s era houses on bigger lots are undergoing tear-down mania for the McMansions. Suburbs with smaller lots and more restrictive zoning will fall farther behind in their tax base and schools, and become more attractive options for the so-called underclass/new immigrants. You really want to see middle class families stay in the city, and suburban cities more welcoming to poor folks? Replace public education with state-paid cash-like education vouchers. The biggest chunk of suburban property taxes (80%+ in my city) gets distributed to the school systems. With people paying high home prices to buy into a neighborhood with a good school system, everyone living there has a massive incentive to keep the less well off out. If, however, the addition of every new child means that your local school has more resources, you have an incentive to welcome greater population density. Property taxes will become more equalized, and where you live will not mandate whether you are likely to get a good education or not. (Added bonus: you wouldn't have idiotic proposals like the one currently circulating by our vaunted leaders to have Chicago public school children boycott the first day of school and show up at New Trier high school in the suburbs to protest the "disparity" of education expenditures).
- Dee Grant
August 11, 2008 at 3:18pm
The author referenced higher gasoline prices twice times as contributing to a demographic change. Gas prices have been unusually high for about 18 months, if that long. The author is a moron.
- joshua
August 11, 2008 at 3:30pm
I disagree with the comments suggesting that gasoline prices have anything to do with re-gentrification. Crime control and good, affordable schools are what it takes. The crime rate has dropped in many places and charter schools solve the school problem. City living works well for dual-career couples.
- Stacie
August 11, 2008 at 4:34pm
'Hipsters' please cram yourselves into the downtowns at black hole densities, and sell your cars. Me, I'm buying a 10,000 acre spread, where there is 'nothing to do', and putting my house in the middle.
- B
August 11, 2008 at 4:51pm
I think that several of the underlying assumptions in this article could be questioned. One in particular is the assumption that people need to live in or commute to a city to work. In these days of Internet, cellphone, etc., the need to travel to a central location to work is diminishing, and will eventually be gone. All those who think that high gasoline prices will force people to move back downtown are deluding themselves. There is no shorter commute than the one to a home office in the next room. With broadband Internet and a UPS delivery route going by the front door, I can live in East Jesus, Utah and still have the same shopping and entertainment options as someone in the inner city, with much lower costs, crime, etc. This article looks like similar articles I have read elsewhere, where people that live in urban areas make up fairy tales about how everyone else wants to be like them, or ought to be like them.
- sam
August 11, 2008 at 4:55pm
Alan, I know this may be slightly beside the point you were trying to make. but I had to comment on this. In order to illustrate the introduction to your article, you make it sound as if the transit issue was just a chance occurrence, but this was not the case. It would have been quite easy for Chicago Transit Authority officials to run empty express trains to the inner city stations to relieve the pressure on those platforms, but they chose not to do so. Even so, this was not the primary source of minority anger with Bilandic. The main controversy concerned the selective nature of snow plowing decisions. Many minority neighborhoods remained incapacitated for days while arteries and side streets in other communities appeared to benefit from the lion's share of snow removal efforts. There were deliberate decisions made which were to the detriment of minority communities, and these, not accidents of residential patterns, where what lost Bilandic the election. These events in part galvanized blacks, Hispanics, and progressive whites into a voting block, which eventually led to the election of Harold Washington as the first African American mayor of Chicago.
- Steven
August 11, 2008 at 4:59pm
Very interesting article and comments. I was particularly taken with the author's observation that many of the young denizens of DC's 14th & U were refugees from a boring suburban upbringing. My boys were raised in Adams-Morgan (DC) and we lived through the 1968 riots and some really serious crimes in the neighborhood. When they were reaching their adolescence, they needed much larger recreational opportunities than were available at the postage-stamp sized park in the neighborhood, which was wonderful for toddlers. What the 'burbs offered them in the later 70s was very well organized and funded athletic programs, music in the schools (a symphony orchestra, no less), etc. The education/recreation situation has not changed all that much in the District over the last 30 years. What has changed is the onset of a new, ruthless attitude on the part of city hall toward low-income (read crime-ridden) neighborhoods. Each one successively has been targeted, developers have been enticed to come in, and—voila!—new urban spaces provided (at a price) for the former denizens of suburbia looking for a better time. DC is now much livelier as a result. Massive redevelopment has affected nearly all of northwest, is proceeding like wildfire in southwest, and is moving into southeast. Northeast is still pretty much up for grabs, with drive-by murders pretty much routine. Now we're without children and live very comfortably on Connecticut Avenue NW with one car, well away from the northeast crime zones. Unless young parents-to-be are willing to put up with crappy schools and virtually no public football/baseball/soccer/lacrosse fields, they will find a move out of DC at some point mandatory. By the way, none of my three sons now are in any way urbanites. Living in Adams-Morgan seems to have had that effect.
- JohnR(DC)
August 11, 2008 at 5:04pm
While I enjoyed 'Seinfield' and 'Friends' that was in spite of my BS meter alerting me that none of the characters had jobs capable of supporting the romanticized and comfy urban lifestyle depicted.
- J Reece
August 11, 2008 at 7:30pm
What most people seem to forget is that the original impetus which depleted the urban cores of their productive citizens was an attempt at social engineering: court-ordered busing. To the utter dismay of the Illuminati, their experiment screwed up badly because the filthy damn white LAB RATS escaped in droves. In other words, they voted with their feet. They left. And all this was possible because of cheap personal transportation that would allow people to escape the jurisdictions that would require them to behave in ways that they did not wish to behave. No longer did they have to work in the same political jurisdiction that they lived. And the lesson learned by the Illuminati: If you wish to run experiments on the rats, you must first ensure that they cannot escape the experiment. One simple way to do this is to implement policies that will raise the price of gasoline. If you destroy the mobility of the lab rats then you can have a good environment in which to run your experiments in social engineering. And--GOSH--just what political party likes to engage in social engineering and also has policies which prevent us from drilling for oil on our own land? Could it possibly be that the two positions are more linked to one another than that political party would ever dare to admit publicly?
- Tcobb
August 11, 2008 at 7:46pm
I find the article interesting no doubt, but it just highlights exactly what is wrong with this demographic shift: the wealthy get to live wherever they want and the poor just get stuck with the leftovers. I wonder, will children from the city living in less than desirable conditions be allowed into these chartes schools mentioned by "dc resident?" Will poor, undereducated adults be ecouraged to partake in community spaces such as athletic clubs, parks, cafes, etc once the suburbanites put their stamp on them? I am eager to hear how dc resident incorporates the original residents of their new neighborhood into their living space rather than banishing them out to the unhip suburbs. For the record, I am offended by your use of the word "pioneer." I am sure that prevoius residents living in the crime, rats and filth made many an attempt to improve their environment, but without social clout and the ability to organize how far do you expect people to go? You, my friend are not a pioneer, you are simply a person with money.
- CB from the O
August 11, 2008 at 7:57pm
Not mentioned in the article is the crime that is following all those displaced by tearing down the housing projects. And many small towns and suburban police are ill equipped to handle it.
- Nick in DC
August 11, 2008 at 11:37pm
I think a better term for this would be "re-urban sprawl"
- Patrick
August 12, 2008 at 12:35pm
Enjoyed the article, not so much the comments. Discussions like this seem to quickly degenerate into defensiveness about personal lifestyle choices and recitations of pat ideological positions. While the author does let on that he thinks the trend is positive (anyone who knows anything about city governance would), his main point is to identify an emerging trend. That's all. Whether you personally are part of the trend, or whether it's a win-win scenario for all involved, is not the issue. Also, keep in mind that demographic statistics are only available for the past and may tell us little about the way things are trending now. The dearth of statistics to prove the point doesn't automatically make the point wrong or "poorly researched." If you want to identify emerging trends, you are going to have to rely to some degree on anecdote and observation.
- Matthew
August 18, 2008 at 11:34am
An interesting article, but as one of the commenters noted not only the poor get priced out of the near central city living, particularly when the price of educating kids is tossed in. Admssion to a Chicago magnet school or to the Illinois Mathmatics and Science Academy helps, but the local Chicago PUblic Schools, although getting better, are just not up to an acceptable quality level. I don't think that the well off suburban high schools ringing Chicago have much of a worry about Chicago school academic competition. But yes, folks in the burbs are selling out and moving to a downtown high rise, after the kids are gone. But there aren't a lot of poor, minority folks in Glencoe. One other thing...it is my historical (and literary and cinematic) recollection that many of the poor --- the starving actors and artists certainly, did not live outside of Paris, but on the top of Paris, the fabled 7th floor garrets, the so-called chambres de bonne. Or are all of those movies, operas, books and history simply wrong.
- Democratus
August 18, 2008 at 8:09pm
I believe this article is very enlightening, However I also feel as though even though individuals are trying to make people believe that it is not racism causing such a geographical switch, I believe it is the main underlining issues, Simply because minorities do not have the funding options to be envolved in such endeavors. Unless they are entertainers. somewhat famous or wealthy and to be honest there are not a lot of wealthy minorities that this type of situation affects, and so the minorities that don't have the dollars don't have a voice, I am a 38 year old married woman and between my husband and I we make $55,000 dollars a year. And we reside in Portland Oregon, We have lived in the North and North East side of town all of our lives. ?Which is 5-10 minutes away from downtown Portland, With in the last 4 years I have noticed the prices of rental properties have gone up almost 35% and the homes for sale are upwards of 300,000- 500,00 dollars. I now reside in Gresham Oregon, Because the cost for rentals are what the prices use to be just a year ago in the innercity. Gresham Oregon use to be prodomently white. Now all I see when I drive down the street in traffic or walking around are Mexicans and blacks. I believe that race and the ability for minorities to obtain sufficient pay plays a huge role in the changes that we see across the United Stats
- kim
August 26, 2008 at 4:12pm
Regarding Vancouver, yes 20% of 600,000 people do live in the downtown area, but Vancouver is not an island. It exists in a region and you cannot simply ignore the area outside of Vancouver's proper borders. Out of 2.7 million who live in Metro Vancouver, about 120,000 live downtown. Maybe it's still impressive by US standards but definitely not as impressive as the 20% figure.
- s.
September 11, 2008 at 4:31pm
The other important fact to remember about Vancovuer is that there is an Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) in the metro region. The ALR is a province-wide reserve instituted in 1973 by the New Democratic Party (NDP) provincial government of the day. This contributes greatly to the overall compactness of the Metro Vancouver region.
- peter
September 11, 2008 at 8:28pm
I missed this article the first time around. And now, I must say I am shocked that such an article can be considered the best of anything. Yes, it's an interesting concept. But the author's work is called into question by his complete omission of Toronto as a place where such "inversion" has been going on for decades. The poor live in the burbs, the rich live downtown. Well established and missed by this article. Whatelse was left out or shoddily researched?
- tom
January 5, 2009 at 10:52am
In a city as large as New York, a related phenomenon has been underway for about a generation. That phenomenon is the yuppie/hipster invasion, including many in the arts, of (relatively more) affordable outer-borough neighborhoods close to Manhattan and well served by public transit. Downtown Brooklyn's brownstone belt is the oldest, extending now well into Flatbush and other central Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy; followed by the chicification of north Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. Examples in Queens include Long Island City, Sunnyside and Woodside. In the Bronx, including Mott Haven and Alexander Avenue. And on Staten Island, the list includes close-to-the-ferry north shore neighborhoods of St. George, New Brighton, Tompkinsville and Stapleton. These neighborhoods are no longer cheap, even by New York standards. But they're a lot more affordable than any Manhattan neighborhood, offering not just cheaper rents but considerably larger living and work spaces, greener surroundings, and less congestion as well. At least in New York, it's not quite the total inversion Alan Ehrenhalt describes.
- bencharif
January 5, 2009 at 2:26pm
Pontormo, I see nothing in your post that contradicts the author. The inversion he speaks of is the very one you are complaining about. Your upset is understandable, but you shouldn't be so upset that you can't recognize when someone is on your side!
- Orkblork
May 18, 2009 at 12:46pm
JohnR, You really have no idea what you are talking about with comments like the "northeast crime zones." NE is gentrifying at a faster rate than Columbia heights or Petworth which have already plateaued. Near North east, or Capitol hill north as its called is the fastest changing area of DC. Everything south of Florida ave is changing faster than U street did in the late 90's. The entire H street / atlas district nightlife area sprung up in less than 3 years and is now the the most desirable nightlife area in the city. Adams Morgan and U street increasingly are nothing more than the destination of choice of the suburban bridge & tunnel crowd from VA & MD. You have an antiquated perception of everything outside of NW. I doubt you would have even ventured into SE if it wasn't for the National's new stadium. NE is not what it was 20, or even 10 years ago, having read this article you should understand that.
- ML
August 17, 2009 at 5:21pm