Who’s Urban Now?

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

American cities are changing fast-as is Americans’ desire to live in urban centers. Urbanologist Alan Ehrenhalt visits Zócalo in Phoenix to discuss how and if the nation’s sprawling cities can find their centers. The following is an excerpt from the prologue to Ehrenhalt’s latest book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.

A little more than 30 years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a snowstorm. A blizzard in January 1979 dumped more than 20 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 town, 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 virtually coming to resemble a traditional European city-Vienna or Paris in the 19th 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 of 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 15,000. Seven years later it was approaching 50,000. 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 600,000, 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 a 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 portion of the city’s 600,000 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 populations, 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. The 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 such few 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 in a moment in which the massive outward migrations of the affluent that characterized the second half of the 20th century is coming to an end. And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility as a result.

Excerpted from The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt. Copyright © 2012 by Alan Ehrenhalt. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

*Photo courtesy of footloosiety.


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