The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Read online

  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: 978-0-307-95740-5

  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

  PROLOGUE Trading Places

  CHAPTER ONE A Backward Glance

  CHAPTER TWO A Neighborhood in Chicago

  CHAPTER THREE Re-creation in New York

  CHAPTER FOUR The New Suburbia

  CHAPTER FIVE Caught in the Middle

  CHAPTER SIX Uneasy Coexistence

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Urban Squeeze

  CHAPTER EIGHT Creating a Downtown

  CHAPTER NINE Urbanizing the Suburbs

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  PROLOGUE

  TRADING PLACES

  A LITTLE MORE THAN thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a 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.

  SO FAR, I haven’t used the words that make the most dramatic case for the reality and importance of demographic inversion. But I will use them now: the price of 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 the two episodes of shortage in the 1970s. They were wrong. Gas prices came down, and the suburbs expanded as never before. But I have seen no convincing evidence that the recent period of volatility in the cost of gasoline has anything to do with the previous ones. Today’s prices at the pump are not the result of political pressures by angry sheikhs in the Persian Gulf. They are the result of increased worldwide demand that is only going to increase, not recede, when the worldwide economy emerges, even if fitfully, from its current doldrums.

  I don’t know how many families living in outer suburbia will make a decision in the coming years to stop paying $100 every few days for a tank of gasoline that will allow them to commute forty or fifty miles a day, round-trip. Some will simply stay where they are and accept the cost. But some will make the opposite decision. The problem for major cities in the coming decade will not be finding people who want to live in the center. It will be finding places to accommodate them. At moments of real estate price deflation, such as the current one, there is a predictable shift in demand and in construction from condominiums to rental apartments. But that does not detract from the reality that the demand for central living space will be a lasting one.

  A significant cadre of urban advocates, including mayors of some of the nation’s largest cities, continue to insist that the middle class will not return to the central city in meaningful numbers until the public school problem is “fixed.” I would be just as happy as anyone else to see schools improve, but I think these people have it backward. The schools improve after the middle class arrives. Schools are not the first piece of the urban revival puzzle that falls into place. They are among the final pieces. The important questions are whether young adults are attracted to the idea of living downtown, whether they will still want to live there once they have children, and whether they will stay when the children reach school age. I think the answer to the first two questions is clearly yes. The strollers have reached Wall Street, and they are not leaving. Take a walk down there some Saturday morning and you will see for yourself. The answer to the third question is one upon which reasonable people may differ. I think that in the coming decade, we will see that question answered in the affirmative as well.

  WHY HAS demographic inversion begun to happen? One might start by recounting the factors that seem obvious, or at least ought to be. The deindustrialization of the central city, for all the tragic human dislocations, has eliminated
many of the things that made affluent people want to move away from it during much of the twentieth century. Since nothing much is manufactured downtown anymore (or anywhere near it), the noise and grime that prevailed through most of the twentieth century have gone away. Manhattan may seem like a gritty and noisy 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 the inhabitants of a century ago. 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; 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 1920s, and for station-wagon suburbs in the 1950s and gated enclaves in the 1970s, do not apply anymore.

  Nor, in general, does the scourge of urban life in the 1970s and 1980s: random street violence. The dramatic decline in all violent crime that took place over the past two decades does seem to have leveled off in the last few years. Cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland have watched murder rates climb in some recent years from the reduced levels of 1995 or 2000. But this increase has been propelled almost entirely by gang- and drug-related violence. 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—does not occur much these days, and it hardly occurs at all to young people. Walk around the neighborhood of Fourteenth 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 twenty-five. 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 thirty years.