The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

267 Pages·2012·4.48 MB·English

by  Alan Ehrenhalt

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Alan Ehrenhalt
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were previously published in
Governing magazine and The New Republic.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrenhalt, Alan, 1947–
The great inversion and the future of the American city / Alan Ehrenhalt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-30795740-5
1. Cities and towns—United States—Case studies.
2. Gentrification—United States—Case studies.
3. Sociology, Urban—United States—Case studies.
I. Title.
HT123.E37 2012
307.760973—dc23 2011035139
Jacket satellite imagery courtesy of TerraServer.com
Jacket design by Chip Kidd
Maps by David Merrill
v3.1
To Suzanne,
with love
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Trading Places
PROLOGUE
A Backward Glance
CHAPTER ONE
A Neighborhood in Chicago
CHAPTER TWO
Re-creation in New York
CHAPTER THREE
The New Suburbia
CHAPTER FOUR
Caught in the Middle
CHAPTER FIVE
Uneasy Coexistence
CHAPTER SIX
The Urban Squeeze
CHAPTER SEVEN
Creating a Downtown
CHAPTER EIGHT
Urbanizing the Suburbs
CHAPTER NINE
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Photo Credits
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
TRADING PLACES
A thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a
LITTLE MORE THAN
snowstorm. A blizzard in January 1979 dumped more than twenty
inches of snow on the ground, leading, among other problems, to 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. Blacks and Hispanics blamed this
on Mayor Michael Bilandic, and he lost the Democratic primary to Jane
Byrne a few weeks later.
Politically, this is ancient history. Demographically, it leads us to a
picture of what has happened in Chicago over the past three decades. No
such event could take place now. This is not because of climate change,
or because the Chicago Transit Authority runs flawlessly. It is 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 years since 1979, Chicago has undergone changes that are
routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated
and more profound than that. A better term is “demographic inversion.”
Gentrification refers to the changes that happen in an individual
neighborhood, usually the replacement of poorer minority residents by
more affluent white ones. Demographic inversion is something much
broader. It is the rearrangement of living patterns across an entire
metropolitan area, all taking place at roughly the same time.
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 are those, some of them black or
Hispanic but most of them white, who can afford to do so.
Events like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed the
present demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly, in
metropolitan areas throughout the country. For much of the past decade,
the national media paid relatively little attention to it. While they were
focused on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities changed right in front of
us, changed from year to year, faster than even the most attentive
students of urban life could easily keep up with.
In some places, the phenomenon of demographic inversion is centered
on racial rearrangement. Atlanta, for example, has long been
overwhelmingly black, but between 2000 and 2010, according to census
figures, the percentage of African Americans within the city fell from 61
percent to 54 percent; in 2009, the city came within a few hundred votes
of electing a white Republican mayor. Within a few years, demographers
agree, blacks will be a minority there. This is happening in part because
the white middle class is moving inside the city borders, but it has more
to do with blacks moving out. In the past two decades alone, two of
Atlanta’s huge suburban counties, Clayton and DeKalb, acquired
substantial black majorities, and immigrants arriving from foreign
countries began settling in overwhelming proportions in suburban
counties, not within the city itself. The numbers for Washington, D.C.,
are strikingly similar to those of Atlanta. Washington, once roughly 70
percent African American, is now barely 50 percent African American.
Race is not always the critical issue in, or even especially relevant to,
the process of demographic change. At the time of the September 11
attacks in 2001, the number of people living in lower Manhattan south
of the World Trade Center was estimated at fifteen thousand. Seven
years later it was approaching fifty thousand. Close to a quarter of these
people were couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The
average household size had become 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 service
jobs. What happened in lower Manhattan isn’t exactly an inversion in
the Chicago sense: Expensive condos replaced offices, not poor people.
But it was a dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
If you want to see this sort of thing writ very large, you can venture
just across the Canadian border, to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Vancouver is a city of about six hundred thousand, roughly the size of
Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual—indeed, unique in all of North
America at this point—is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live
within a couple of square miles of one another 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. New public elementary schools have opened in
downtown Vancouver in the past few years.
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 every time of day. This is what Jane
Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted
goal of urban planners. The irony in Vancouver’s case is that it has not
merely done well at attracting downtown residents, it has done too well.
The condominiums are crowding out office space. Relatively few
commercial building projects have been launched in the past decade,
and there is little vacant land to build them on anyway. This is
Vancouver’s problem today; it may be Wall Street’s problem in the not-
too-distant future.
Some of Vancouver’s center-city residential boom is the plain result of
its dramatic physical setting: blue water and snowcapped mountains
visible from downtown in nearly every direction. Much of it stems from
deliberate public policy: In 1991, the city adopted a program called
Living First, which raised the ceiling on downtown density in exchange
for developer-provided amenities, such as parks, waterfront walkways,
and community centers. But part of it is simply demographics. A large
proportion of the city’s six hundred thousand residents, especially those
with money, want to live downtown. The dramatic changes over the past
decade have reflected this demand.
No American city looks like Vancouver at the moment. But quite a few
are starting to move in this direction. Demographic inversion of one sort
or another is occurring in urban pockets scattered all across America,
many of them in seemingly unlikely places. Charlotte, a city roughly
Vancouver’s size that was hit exceptionally hard by the meltdown in the
financial industry, is nevertheless still experiencing the effects of a
decade-long downtown building boom dominated by new mixed-use
high-rise buildings, with office space on the bottom and condos or rental
units above.
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs, or a
movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. The 2010
census certainly did not turn up evidence of a middle-class stampede to
the nation’s cities. The news was mixed: Some of the larger cities on the
East Coast tended to gain population, albeit in small increments. Those
in the Midwest, including Chicago, tended to lose substantial numbers.
The cities that showed gains in overall population during the entire
decade tended to be in the South and Southwest. But when it comes to
measuring demographic inversion, raw census numbers are an
ineffective blunt instrument. A closer look at the results shows that the
most powerful demographic events of the past decade were the
movement of African Americans out of central cities (180,000 of them in
Chicago alone) and the settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs, often
ones many miles distant from downtown. Central-city areas that gained
affluent residents in the first part of the decade maintained that
population in the recession years from 2007 to 2009. They also,
according to a 2011 study by Brookings, suffered considerably less from
increased unemployment than the suburbs did. Not many young
professionals moved to new downtown condos in the recession years
because few such residences were being built. But there is no reason to
believe that the demographic trends prevailing prior to the construction
bust will not resume once that bust is over. It is important to remember
that demographic inversion is not a proxy for population growth; it can
occur in cities that are growing, those whose numbers are flat, and even
in those undergoing a modest decline in size.
America’s major cities face enormous fiscal problems, many of them
the result of public pension obligations they incurred in the more
prosperous years of the past two decades. Some, Chicago prominent
among them, simply are not producing enough revenue to support the
level of public services to which most of their citizens have grown to feel
entitled. How the cities are going to solve this problem, I do not know.
What I do know is that if fiscal crisis were going to drive affluent
professionals out of central cities, it would have done so by now. There
is no evidence that it has.
The truth is that 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. And we need to adjust our
perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility as a result.
Much of our perspective on the process of metropolitan settlement
dates, whether we realize it or not, from a paper written in 1925 by the
University of Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess. It was Burgess who
defined four urban/suburban zones of settlement: a central business
district; an area of manufacturing just beyond it; then a residential area
inhabited by the industrial and immigrant working class; and finally an
outer enclave of single-family dwellings.
Burgess was right about the urban America of 1925; he was right
about the urban America of 1974. Virtually every city in the country had
a downtown, where the commercial life of the metropolis was
conducted; it had a factory district just beyond; it had districts of
working-class residences just beyond that; and it had residential suburbs
for the wealthy and the upper middle class at the far end of the
continuum. As a family moved up the economic ladder, it also moved
outward from crowded working-class districts to more spacious
apartments and, eventually, to a suburban home. The suburbs of
Burgess’s time bore little resemblance to those at the end of the
twentieth century, but the theory still essentially worked. People moved
ahead in life by moving farther out.
But in the past decade, in quite a few places, this model has ceased to
describe reality. There are still downtown commercial districts, but there
are no factory districts lying next to them. There are scarcely any
factories at all. These close-in parts of the city, whose few residents
Burgess described as dwelling in “submerged regions of poverty,
degradation and disease,” are increasingly the preserve of the affluent
who work in the commercial core. And just as crucially, as we will see
over the course of this book, newcomers to America are not settling on
the inside and accumulating the resources to move out; they are living in
the suburbs from day one.
S , I haven’t used the words that make the most dramatic case for the
O FAR