But if the Indians are having a notable influence on school life in Gwinnett, the most remarkable immigrant story in the county is that of the Koreans. They are not the most numerous of the foreign-born, nor the most conspicuous. But their effect on the county’s economic life promises only to grow stronger in the years ahead.
They did not come to the Atlanta suburbs in search of menial work, the way many of the Hispanics did, or to find jobs as high-tech professionals, as many Indians did, or as refugees from persecution, like the Vietnamese. They came, more than anything else, to make substantial amounts of money as business entrepreneurs. This they have done with remarkable skill.
The growing importance of Koreans in Gwinnett County traces back to the ambitions of Il Yeon Kwon, an entrepreneur who began his career in the Saudi Arabia of the 1980s as a driver for the Korean automaker Hyundai. There was a sizable Korean presence in Saudi Arabia at the time, and not a single restaurant or store that offered this population Korean food. Kwon switched his efforts from driving cars to feeding his countrymen, and did so well so quickly that he decided to apply the same formula in the United States. He started with a three-thousand-square-foot supermarket in New York, in Woodside, Queens, where a significant number of Koreans lived, and was equally successful.
But it was not until the beginning years of this century that he turned his attention to suburban Atlanta. In 2004 he opened his H Mart store on Pleasant Hill Road in Duluth, a massive store with sixty-five thousand square feet of space. There was already a substantial Korean presence in Gwinnett, but the store and the satellites it spawned quickly brought in a whole influx of newcomers. For some Koreans living in diverse parts of the United States, the clincher seemed to be the moment they learned that H Mart carried fresh octopus. “That one shop brought people from Korea, not just L.A. and Chicago,” says Moses Choi, a prominent Korean businessman in Duluth. “Koreans have two degrees of separation, not six. Word of mouth spreads faster.”
More than any of the other immigrant groups in Gwinnett, Koreans pooled resources and immediately began buying businesses. Strip malls are thriving in much of Gwinnett County, because Korean immigrants were willing to invest in them and maintain them. The billiard parlors and cell phone stores along Buford Highway in Norcross, patronized mostly by Hispanics, are owned almost entirely by Koreans. A large share of the beauty supplies sold to African Americans and Hispanics in the United States comes from small-scale Korean-owned factories along the Buford corridor. Many Koreans refinanced their homes to buy these businesses and strip malls, and they continued to buy them even in the depths of recession.
But the strip malls pale in comparison to Kwon’s five massive H Mart supermarkets. Their produce, seafood, and prices are attractive enough that many have acquired a substantial Anglo clientele. One of the largest supermarkets is built around a horseshoe-shaped open-air mall, and the smaller restaurants and specialty stores that line that mall are thriving as well. The even larger Mega Mart opened in 2010 in the once-vibrant but now aging and troubled Gwinnett Place Mall, the 1980s retail blockbuster plagued by a declining Anglo customer base.
Meanwhile, there are four Korean-language daily newspapers in Gwinnett County, and two radio stations. On one day in 2009, the largest of the newspapers carried fifty-eight pages of advertising. Several of the old-line suburban banks in Gwinnett are now Korean banks: North Atlanta Bank is part of the Seoul-based Shinhan banking empire. When it comes to banking, unlike grocery shopping, virtually all the customers are Koreans.
Duluth, where the first H Mart opened, is rapidly becoming a Korean town. Another large contingent lives in Suwanee, the wealthiest town in the county, where the public schools turn out the highest achievement scores. By and large, though, the Koreans, like the Indians, have tended to spread out all around the county, rather than clustering together.
None of this takes into account the single largest minority group in Gwinnett County: African Americans. There has been a modest black population in the rural parts of the county for a century, but those numbers have grown substantially in the past two decades, and today nearly 40 percent of Gwinnett’s minorities are African American or immigrants from Africa. There is an underclass black presence in Lawrenceville, Buford, and a few of the other larger towns, but much of the population growth has been rooted in middle-class flight from Atlanta, and is increasingly dispersed throughout the county.
The high-income enclave of Suwanee is home to a growing number of affluent African American families. Duluth’s residents include a disproportionate share of the area’s best-known black athletes and entertainers. In general, the African American community has had little social or political interaction with the foreign-born and has made few efforts to gain political power. “We’re not as politically active as we should be,” admits Herman Pennamon Jr., the community relations manager for Georgia Power and a longtime player in black leadership circles. “The minority community is not engaged.” One senses that the current cohort of overwhelmingly Anglo Republican county leadership can’t last much longer. But significant change will probably have to involve the more active participation of the black community.
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ANY FAST-CHANGING community spends a sizable amount of its time wondering what it will be like a decade hence. That is why “visioning exercises” or their equivalent take place all over the nation. But in Gwinnett County, these questions take on more drama than they do in most places. The county has been altered so much in two decades—changed beyond comprehension, in the minds of some residents—that the future of Gwinnett seems to be an inescapable topic no matter where in the county you go.
One thing appears almost certain: Gwinnett will change physically. It is not only a sprawl county, it is utterly horizontal, more so than almost any of its large suburban counterparts in America. In 2009, there were only two buildings anywhere in the county more than ten stories tall, and you could drive for miles without seeing anything higher than four stories. Until 2005, it was actually illegal to build a structure of more than twenty-five floors, but that had little impact, because hardly any developers wanted to create them. Land was so cheap, and so flat and easy to build on, that businesses in search of extra space simply built longer and wider rather than taller.
But this will change. Gwinnett will continue to grow, and it is unlikely to grow through the construction of more sprawling subdivisions in the near future. Too many of the current ones are partially empty or unfinished. There is a nickname for some of the developments that became stuck in recessionary limbo: They are called pipe farms, for the small white utility pipes that stick a few feet out of the ground and represent the only visible prospect of future occupancy.
The Chamber of Commerce and the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, two of the leading players, have committed themselves to a much denser future. This means not only skyscrapers along Interstate 85, the traffic-clogged spine of the county, but mixed-use projects in the center of Norcross and Lilburn and Duluth. The county government seems to accept this in principle, although a fair number of the long-term residents still don’t.
But much depends on transportation. Currently, Gwinnett County has what must be the single worst public transportation system of any large county in America. Until 2000, it had no public system at all. The county’s voters twice refused to participate in MARTA, Atlanta’s regional transit network. Express buses to downtown Atlanta do exist, but otherwise about all you can do without a car in Gwinnett is take an infrequent bus to the end-of-the-line MARTA stop at Doraville.
The Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District has drawn up plans for a new light-rail system that would reach many of the towns, and whose stations would be surrounded by mixed-use developments and buildings much taller than any of those existing now. Whether voters will support this remains an open question. The momentum for it in the business community may well make it happen despite voter doubts. But it will also depend in part on the makeup of
the county commission.
Explanations for preservation of the status quo are not hard to find. For one thing, political participation among the burgeoning ethnic communities at both city and county levels continues to be low. “We don’t have a lot of diversity in our civic organizations,” says Diana Preston, the mayor of Lilburn. “For that matter, we don’t have that many organizations.” The county has set up a variety of boards to deal with immigrant social service needs, and there is often a minimum percentage requirement for immigrant participation, but the organizers have had difficulty recruiting immigrants to join the boards and stay on them.
Some consider the emergence of the new ethnic groups as key political players to be merely a matter of time. In most immigrant communities in America, it is the second generation that begins to take politics seriously. That doesn’t imply as long a wait in Gwinnett as it might seem; among some of the groups, the second generation is already approaching adulthood. “It’s about time for the Asian community to have some role in the government,” declares Vietnamese community leader Lam Ngo. Korean activist Moses Choi insists that this is not only important, but inevitable. “It will change the landscape,” he says, “and it will change politics.”
But there are complications. It is not the same thing as African Americans rising to political power in Atlanta in the 1970s. There are literally dozens of distinct ethnic groups in Gwinnett, and most of them have little to do with each other in the settings where political ties might be forged. “Each minority kind of keeps to themselves,” says Norcross Mayor Johnson. “They do business with one another, but when they want to go to church, they want to go to church with people who look like them.” The Hispanics and the Asians have very little in common, and even among the Asians, there is a general absence of common ground. The idea of Koreans, Vietnamese, and Indians creating a political coalition seems, at best, premature.
The groups do work together on some questions that pose immediate concern to all of them. In 2009, when the Georgia legislature considered a bill to require that all drivers’ tests be conducted in English, a consortium of immigrant organizations joined forces to help derail it. But that was the exception, not the rule. When it comes to immigrants achieving a role in county government that equates to their population in the county, there are few signs of progress as yet.
But the most intriguing question of all is the question of Gwinnett’s demographic future. It is a question of whether the close division of white and nonwhite is sustainable—whether a new round of white flight will take place, into more distant counties such as Jackson or Forsyth, leaving behind a minority-dominated Gwinnett.
The white-flight scenario is unconvincing, for several reasons. One is that many of the remaining white home owners are older people who will choose to age in place, rather than taking up new roots in an even more distant exurban county. Another is that this sort of flight means choosing to live many miles away from jobs and amenities, not only those in Atlanta but even those in Gwinnett itself. At present, some 58 percent of the people who live in Gwinnett work in the county. Relocating farther out would mean, in many cases, reestablishing the painfully long commutes that Gwinnett residents have struggled in recent years to avoid. In short, there are few practical locations to flee to.
“Nobody moves out now for white flight,” says Bucky Johnson, speaking with perhaps a touch of exaggeration but with an air of resolute confidence. Or in the words of Chuck Warbington, who runs the quasi-public Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, “the rubber band of suburban sprawl has stretched about as far as it can go.”
The politicians tend to envision—and statistics would seem to suggest—a different sort of future. This would involve significant white gentrification based on the urban density and transit options being planned for the small close-in cities; a leveling-off of the Hispanic population based on the unlikelihood of a new construction boom; and a steady increase in the number of Asians, especially from India and Korea. These demographics would be different in important ways not only from those of 1990, but from those of 2010.
Of course, nobody really knows. The only certainty is continued change. “Gwinnett County,” says housing developer Marina Peed, “isn’t really a melting pot. It’s more like a petri dish. It’s a real social experiment.”
CHAPTER FIVE
CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
IF GWINNETT COUNTY is an experiment in the twenty-first-century suburban future, then Cleveland Heights, Ohio, is an experiment of a radically different form. It tests whether an inner suburb next to an economically stagnant industrial city, a town built in the 1920s for affluent businessmen and their families, can hold on a century later as a strange pastiche of the very wealthy, the very poor, an aging middle class, and a burgeoning population of bohemians, young and old.
Cleveland Heights is a small suburb of 46,121 people, practically walkable from its eastern to its western borders at the narrowest point, but in its way, it encapsulates much of the history of the oldest American suburbia. At its southern end, along Fairmount Boulevard, it is lined with Tudor and Georgian mansions, still elegant and well maintained, although the ownership base has changed from one dominated by industrial managers to one composed to a large extent of medical doctors, professors, and a sprinkling of performers from the Cleveland Orchestra. At the far opposite end of town, along the blocks closest to the dilapidated neighborhoods of East Cleveland, there are nearly a thousand foreclosed and vacant homes and rows of prewar apartment buildings occupied by former Cleveland public housing tenants paying rent with the federal government’s Section 8 housing vouchers. In between are Cape Cod bungalows built in the 1950s for blue-collar workers whose jobs were in Cleveland or in the neighboring industrial suburb of Euclid.
The commercial middle of Cleveland Heights can be a bit of a shock to those who haven’t seen it before. Where one might be expecting a 1920s main thoroughfare of heavy car and foot traffic, shops, and restaurants, there is an immense sea of asphalt parking lot and a sprawling mall filled with big-box stores: Walmart, Home Depot, Best Buy. It is called Severance Town Center, and it includes the Cleveland Heights City Hall on its outside edge, but it is not a community center in any meaningful suburban sense. It is difficult even to get from one end of the project to the other without driving. To anyone who believes in the virtues of human-scale commercial life, Severance Town Center is a hideous eyesore. There is no other way to put it.
But a few blocks south of this asphalt jungle, one reaches Coventry Street and enters bohemia. The street itself, day and night, is a parade of millennials with tattoos and nose rings, baby boomers of both sexes with long gray ponytails, and young African American men driving by with hip-hop blaring from their car stereos. There are clusters of bookstores, mostly used and occult, and a vegetarian-friendly restaurant so popular that its patrons spill out onto the sidewalk as they wait half an hour for a table.
This is the volume of street life, if not the exact style, that one associates with the older American suburbs built for streetcar commuters in the 1920s. Cleveland Heights has it. There just isn’t enough—at least, not in the place where one might go looking for it, the center of town. But the coexistence of Severance Town Center and Coventry Street is part of what makes Cleveland Heights so intriguing. It is suburban territory of every era and every style, perched rather awkwardly on one small municipal parcel of eight square miles. The question is whether it can survive in that form.
How exactly do you define a first-ring or inner suburb? There have been several plausible attempts. Bernadette Hanlon of the University of Maryland says, rather concisely, that an inner suburb is a place that is adjacent to a city and another suburb and in which a majority of the housing stock dates from before 1969. Cleveland State professor Tom Bier has a more nuanced description: a suburb that is almost completely built out, with no room for physical expansion; little or no growth in property value; housing that is at least fifty years old; and heavy unmet infrastru
cture maintenance needs. Cleveland Heights meets that definition very well.
• • •
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS is in the uncomfortable center of demographic inversion. Nine miles from downtown Cleveland; served by relatively good public transportation (although with declining levels of service in the last couple of years); immediately adjacent to the region’s largest concentration of universities, hospitals, and museums, nearly all of which are experiencing job growth; blessed with an abundant stock of large, attractive prewar single-family homes; dotted with small neighborhood shopping streets along the lines of Coventry—Cleveland Heights might seem poised to get rich in the way that Sheffield got rich in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s. Urbanites would find the place attractive, and the poor would be pushed farther out. And it may happen somewhere down the road, as a result of challenges and problems that are an inevitable part of demographic inversion.
One of those is race. The nature of Cleveland Heights’ racial challenge has changed enormously in the past several decades. In the 1960s, it was based on a fear of blockbusting, massive white flight, as occurred in the suburb of East Cleveland immediately to the north—and on liberal concerns about discrimination against black families wishing to move into town. An African American arts center was firebombed in the mid-1960s. Those problems were taken care of. There was no massive white flight, thanks in large part to the quality of much of the housing stock, and church groups and other activist organizations put an end to the problem of discrimination in sales.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 12