The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt

  Millions of words have been written in an attempt to understand why crime declined so dramatically in the 1990s, but with no convincing answer to the question. Some scholars attribute reduced crime to the policing reforms that featured more careful collection of statistics and focused on prevention rather than response; others to the simple fact that so many would-be offenders were in prison and unable to cause trouble. There have been arguments that the number of muggings fell because people started carrying less cash in their pockets; there has, much more controversially, been the economist Steven Levitt’s contention that the decline in crime was related to abortion. In Levitt’s view, legalized abortion in the 1970s led in the 1990s to a much smaller cohort of young underclass males most likely to perpetrate crimes. But no one can honestly claim to know for sure.

  Whatever the reasons for the change, the young newcomers who have rejuvenated Fourteenth and U streets in Washington are nearly all convinced 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. I do not claim that a handful of TV shows has somehow produced a new urbanist generation; obviously it is more complicated than that. But it is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this cohort, particularly among its elite.

  In recent years, teaching undergraduate and graduate students at two universities on the East Coast, the majority of them from affluent suburban backgrounds, I made a point of asking where they would prefer to live in fifteen years: in a suburb or in a neighborhood close to the center of a city. Very few ever voted for suburban life. I make no claims to the statistical validity of this inquiry, or to the randomness of the sample, but I can’t help finding it interesting and revealing.

  They had not 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. I think we are a long way from producing a generation for whom urban life and ownership of an automobile are mutually exclusive. In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium has been designed 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 demographic inversion aren’t closely related; they are. This was true before the price of gasoline shot up in 2008. In Atlanta, where the middle-class return to the city is occurring with more suddenness than perhaps anywhere in America, the most frequently cited reason is traffic. People who did not object to a twenty-mile commute in from the suburbs a decade ago are objecting to it now. Of course, that is partly because the same commute takes quite a bit longer than it did in the 1990s. Atlanta is traffic-obsessed to a degree that, among major American cities, perhaps only Los Angeles can match. And it is the place where traffic and demographic inversion seem, at this point, to be most closely tied together.

  Ultimately, though, I don’t think an inversion of the sort now occurring is mostly a result of middle-aged commuters changing their minds, any more than a political realignment is normally a matter of middle-aged people changing their partisan loyalties. It has far more to do with the emergence of new adult cohorts with different values, habits, and living preferences.

  Consider these statistics, compiled from census data by the demographer Arthur C. Nelson. In the peak baby boom period after World War II, roughly half of American households were engaged in the process of raising children. In 2020, extrapolating from census figures, the number will be closer to 25 percent. The increase in the number of single-person households, Nelson reports, will be more than twice the increase in the number of households with children. The percentage of Americans over age sixty-five was 13 percent in 2010; in 2030 it will be 19 percent, an increase of roughly half. This latter number is not a matter of opinion; it is as close to being a statistical fact as anything in demographic projection can possibly be.

  When one thinks of the larger demographic changes that have taken place in America over the past generation—the increased number of people who remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the later age of first marriage, the smaller size of families, and at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their later years—it is hard to escape the notion that we have managed to combine 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 will have the option of living wherever they want, and many—we can only guess how many—will decide in favor of central cities and against distant suburbs. As they do this, others will find themselves forced to live in places less desirable—places farther from the center of the metropolis. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau in October 2011 revealed that in the first decade of the new century, poverty increased by 53 percent in the nation’s suburbs, compared to only 26 percent in the cities.

  This has been true for the bulk of Western urban history; since the Middle Ages, the center of life in urban Europe has normally been the area closest to the core, where commerce, culture, and affluence all congregated together. There is more evidence that the pattern is reasserting itself than that it has come to an end. And as this happens, suburbs that never dreamed of being entry points for immigrants are having 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, and the exurban territory of Chicago. They are not occurring, for the most part, in the cities. That is not where the immigrants are landing.

  There are plenty of responsible critics who look at what appears to be happening and say that a lot is being made out of relatively little. One may object, and plausibly so, that much of what occurred from 2000 to 2008 could be categorized as pre-recession change, a result of the housing bubble that generated a large supply of luxury condos in dozens of American cities, and led to an increase in speculative investment as well. Once conditions return to “normal,” it might be predicted, the supply of high-priced in-town residences will exceed the demand. Indeed, there are estimated two-year to five-year backlogs of empty condos in the downtown areas of cities from Miami to New York, and Chicago to Phoenix. It is possible to envision the supply of urban residences outstripping the demands of prosperous people willing to live in them for years to come.

  Recession or no recession, it is true that the return to the urban center has up to now been modest in absolute numbers. In most metropolitan areas, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, more people still moved to the suburbs than moved downtown. A city of half a million that can report a downtown residential population of twenty-five thousand—5 percent of the total—can claim that it is doing relatively well in this respect. Charlotte, for all the local excitement it generated about upscale in-town living, still has no more than twelve thousand residents downtown. Moreover, these twelve thousand are not a representative sample of the area’s overall populace. Unlike in Vancouver, there are few families with school-age children. Downtown Charlotte has mostly attracted the familiar gentrification cohort: singles, gay and straight 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 throughout America, we are talking about a blip rather than a major cultural phenomenon.

  There is no question that Americans like to ha
ve living space, and the latter half of the twentieth century is a testament to that. There is a reason the average size of a new house built in the United States grew from about one thousand square feet in the years immediately after World War II to more than two thousand today. But the combination of rapid decline in household size and frequently expressed living preferences of the emerging adult generation for walkable compactness suggests that the demand for cul-de-sacs, oversize garages, five-thousand-square-foot suburban residences, and long commutes, even among the most affluent of the millennial generation, will be receding in the years ahead. It seems likely, as suggested above, that more of the social life of the next adult cohort, compared to that of the previous one, will be lived in a public realm, not a closed-off private one, in a more active and vibrant streetscape and in parks and other public spaces. They will have to do with less private living space and more shared urban territory. But this is a choice that a good percentage of them seem prepared to make.

  Even if the critics are right when it comes to the overall numbers—even if the vast majority of cities never sees a downtown affluent residential boom of massive proportions—the significance of demographic inversion for the future of American urban life seems difficult to dispute. The crucial issue is not the number of people living in and near downtown, although that matters. The crucial issue is who they are, and the ways in which whole metropolitan areas are changing as a result.

  WHAT WOULD an American city in the full grip of demographic inversion actually look like? In one plausible scenario, it would look like many of the European capitals of the 1890s: an affluent and stylish urban core surrounded by poorer people and an immigrant working class on the periphery.

  Vienna might be the most interesting example to consider. 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 cafés.

  If you were part of the servant class, the odds were you lived either in the dirty and ill-lit alleys just outside the Ringstrasse circle of prosperity, or else far beyond the center, in a neighborhood called Ottakring, a concentration of more than thirty thousand cramped one- and two-bedroom apartments, whose residents endured a long horsecar 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 Georges-Eugene Haussmann in the 1860s. 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 physical arrangement of metropolitan Paris, with 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. At the same time, I think it is difficult to fashion a convincing argument that a city is morally better off simply by virtue of the poor being on the inside and the rich on the outside, or vice versa. The moral obligation is to treat people humanely, whatever their circumstances. Citizens of metropolitan regions deserve decent places to live, and convenient transportation to their jobs. Which part of the region they inhabit is an economic and planning question, sometimes an aesthetic question, but, in my opinion, not a moral one. I find it hard to see demographic inversion as either a menace or a godsend. But it is a phenomenon that deserves our attention.

  I PAY ATTENTION to it 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 fifty years. The building 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 a science center.

  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 West Side neighborhood, now called University Village. Before the 1960s, this part of the West Side was a compact and somewhat culturally isolated enclave of Jewish and Italian families. (It was also the location of Hull House and the early home of the Chicago Cubs.) For a while after the university was built, the areas around it constituted a sort of residential no-man’s-land, dangerous at night and unattractive to the young academics who taught there. Assistant professors at UIC generally don’t live there now, either, but that is 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 the spot of my grandfather’s shop and order a steak for $24. My grandfather wouldn’t have understood paying that much for a steak, but he would have understood people paying a premium to live near their work.

  You might respond that there is nothing especially noteworthy in all 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 a lesser-known place called 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 mostly by Scandinavian manufacturers, who lived on the tree-lined boulevards while their workers, most of them Polish, rented the bungalows on the side streets. By the 1960s, nearly all the Poles had grown more prosperous and 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 occasional killings on its western fringe, and, even on the quiet residential streets, mothers tell their children to make it 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 a period of five years. The big stone houses built by the factory owners on Logan Boulevard have sold for close to a million dollars, even in a 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 the last decade started. Of course, demographic inversion cannot ever be a one-way street. If some people are coming inside, some people have to be going out. This is occurring in Chicago as in much of the rest of the country.

  DURING THE PAST ten years, with relatively little fanfare and surprisingly little media 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—a huge number, although it was al
ways hard to say precisely just how many public housing residents Chicago had. Most of them have moved beyond the city limits. The 2010 census showed a decline in the city’s black population of 180,000; the demolition of the big housing projects was one of the reasons for this, and helps to explain why the city as a whole suffered a population loss of 6.9 percent. At the same time, suburbs stretching out as far as forty miles from Chicago are housing many more African American residents than they did a decade ago. The city government in Chicago promised to construct new mixed-use housing for large numbers of those displaced by the removal of the projects, but reporting by the Chicago Tribune at the end of the decade documented that only a small proportion of the mixed-use units had been built. Even if they had, it seems indisputable that there would have been a mass exodus of blacks from the city in the first decade of the new century; this is what was taking place in cities all over the country, including those that did not tear down large numbers of high-rise housing projects.

  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 all the time. They are living in suburban or exurban territory that, until a decade ago, was almost exclusively Anglo, middle-class, and white. Chicago is not nineteenth-century Vienna—it never will be—but this is one more sign that its demographic inversion is well under way.

  Now is the time to begin talking about the consequences of demographic inversion, and the possible futures it might set in motion. On the extreme dystopian end, one can conjure up gated enclaves of the wealthy clinging to the center, with the poor out of sight and largely forgotten, Paris-style, in some new kind of high-rise. I think this is the least likely scenario. We do not have to worry about a return of the idea of warehousing the poor in vertical Corbusian ghettos. That is one beast we have managed to slay. Large American cities are not integrated today the way idealists hoped they would be by this time; poor people and minorities still live in clusters; but those clusters now exist in many different sections of cities and metropolitan regions. Segregation may not be gone, but it is not what it was in 1960.