Alan Ehrenhalt - The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

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 townsUnited StatesCase studies.
2. GentrificationUnited StatesCase studies.
3. Sociology, UrbanUnited StatesCase studies.
I. Title.
HT123.E37 2012
307.760973dc23 2011035139

Jacket satellite imagery courtesy of TerraServer.com
Jacket design by Chip Kidd
Maps by David Merrill

v3.1

To Suzanne,
with love

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 cityVienna 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 Atlantas 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 isnt 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 unusualindeed, unique in all of North America at this pointis that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of one another in the citys 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 Vancouvers 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 Vancouvers problem today; it may be Wall Streets problem in the not-too-distant future.

Some of Vancouvers 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 citys six hundred thousand residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown. The dramatic changes over the past decade have reflected this demand.