My guess is that when all of this development is completed, no matter how many years from now, Andres Duany’s vision won’t be close to realization. Nor do I expect that Tysons Corner will much resemble the green pedestrian oasis pictured in the computerized Macerich sketches. But I think it will meet the standards of retrofitted suburbia. I also think it will be a commercial success.
I’m convinced of that because I see all around me a generation of young, mainstream, middle-class adults who are looking for some form of midlevel urban experience: not bohemian inner-city adventure, but definitely not cul-de-sacs and long automobile commutes. There are more of them coming into the residential market every year. They like the idea of having some space, but they aren’t fleeing in terror at the mention of density. They aren’t willing to sell their cars, but they appreciate the advantage of having another way to get around. If Tysons Corner is rebuilt on a reasonable human scale and with a modicum of physical appeal, they will go for it, imperfect as it may be.
And then we will begin to see experiments of this sort in suburbs all over the country, launched by developers and local governments that may still be a little nervous about density but will know one thing for sure: If Tysons Corner can be reborn, nothing in the suburbs is beyond hope. If the effort to rebuild Tysons Corner somehow succeeds, it will become a national model for retrofitting suburbia for the millennial generation.
CONCLUSION
WORLD WAR II was a long way from over at the beginning of 1944, but the outcome was taken for granted among the civilian population in the United States. The Allies would win, and a new kind of world would come into place. The debate among economists and public policy experts was about what that world would be like. Should the nation expect a return to the conditions of economic stagnation that had prevailed for more than a decade before the war brought three years of unexpected prosperity? Or would it be a different sort of world, operating under new rules that might make possible a sustained period of national economic health and stability?
A majority of economists took the pessimistic side. The war had brought the Great Depression to an end, they reasoned, but it was an artificial boom that had been caused by military production and could not be expected to last. Once the war was over, we would be returning to the same economic hard times that had prevailed prior to Pearl Harbor. A minority of specialists felt this was false: The coming elements of American civic life were unpredictable, they wrote, but there was no reason to assume that these would be the ones that had existed prior to the cataclysmic Second World War.
In a very different but interesting way, 2011 feels like 1944 might have felt to those who were living through it. The United States is gradually reaching the end of a cataclysm, economic rather than military, but a cataclysm nonetheless, and it is impossible not to wonder what ordinary American life will look like in the postrecession future. Some of the most intriguing questions this time are ones of culture, demographics, and the use of physical space. It is perfectly possible to argue, as critics such as Joel Kotkin and David Brooks do, that the rules are not about to change—that the auto-dependent existence, suburban expansion, and the urban decline of the late twentieth century will simply resume. It is also possible to argue, as do critics on the other side, such as Christopher Leinberger and Arthur C. Nelson, that the Great Recession will prove to be a cultural and demographic turning point. Cities and suburbs will cease to play the role that they played in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is plausible to contend—as this book largely does—that the roles of cities and suburbs will not only change but will very nearly reverse themselves. A demographic inversion will take place.
Much that is important remains unpredictable by anyone writing about the future of the urban and suburban experience. In the year 2020, will the price of gasoline be $3 a gallon? Five dollars? Ten dollars? We all saw what happened in the spring of 2008, when the price of a gallon of gas first rose beyond $4 in most parts of the country. The demand for expensive homes in the exurbs declined, and the interest in urban living among the affluent rose. I am not an expert on energy policy, but most of those who are predict that when the economies of the developed world regain their strength, the demand for oil will be great enough to drive gas prices in America beyond where they were in 2008, or where they are now.
On the other hand, what if cars powered by fuels other than gasoline become ubiquitous on American highways, and the cost of driving long distances each day remains what it is now, or even becomes cheaper? One has a right to be skeptical about this happening anytime in the near future. The arrival of these cars has been anticipated now for a generation, and still only a relative handful are in operation. But suppose something like this does occur. Suppose it becomes possible to buy a car at close to the current price that can travel eighty miles on one gallon of fuel. Will that allow the car-dominated outer suburb to continue flourishing? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Fuel economy does not decrease traffic congestion or reduce the length of the daily commute. In many American cities, the question of where to live is already as much a question of time as it is of money. That will continue to be true in the postrecession world, no matter how much it costs in fuel to drive a mile down the road. People who live in the American cities of the next generation will be doing so as a matter of choice, and the question of whether to save two or three hours commuting back and forth to work each day rather than staying put in exurbia represents one of the crucial decisions that will determine what the cities and suburbs of the coming decades will look like.
I would go so far as to say that choice is what the urbanism of the next generation is all about. Traditional cities and the pockets of newly created urban design that are springing up around them, as in Denver, will give the millennial generation now entering adulthood a set of options that none of the emerging generations of the past sixty years has really had. Except in a very few places, metropolitan areas around the country did not offer the young adults of the 1960s or 1970s much of a menu when it came to deciding where they might choose to live and raise their families. Unless one was an extremely intrepid pioneer, it was not really practical to live in downtown Charlotte or Memphis or Milwaukee. The number of desirable housing units near the center of most cities was tiny, the supply of services and commerce available was meager, and high crime rates made urban living a dangerous experience that an overwhelming majority of the generation would not consider choosing.
Those problems have not disappeared, but they are disappearing. It is now possible to live in relative comfort in the middle of most of the big cities in America. This may mean doing without a few of the amenities that many middle-class adults like to have, such as a drugstore or grocery store within walking distance, but for others the convenience of walking or taking other quick transportation to restaurants, entertainment, and downtown jobs is a sufficient benefit.
In many cities, at the moment, there is a greater problem of oversupply than of unfulfilled demand. There are partially inhabited or partially complete condominium towers awaiting the return of an economy in which more people who find them attractive will be able to afford them. But this state of affairs will not last forever.
It is important to reiterate that demographic inversion and mass migration are not the same thing. Mass migration means, to me, at least, a reversal in which a much greater proportion of the residents of a large metropolitan area will live near the center of the city than have lived there for the past thirty or forty years. Robert Fishman, one of America’s most respected urban historians, believes that a “fifth great migration” is taking place. This amplifies the contention of Lewis Mumford in the 1920s that there had been three previous ones (west across the frontier in the early nineteenth century; from farms to factory towns a few decades later; and to the great metropolitan centers around the beginning of the twentieth century), and Mumford’s accurate prediction that there would soon be a fourth, decentralizing population away from city centers and into empty
suburban land, as the twentieth century unfolded.
Fishman’s fifth great migration, back to city centers and away from suburbs, is one he believes will dominate urban demographics in the generation to come. In his view, this will be a full-scale city revival that “will reurbanize precisely those inner-city districts that were previously depopulated.” These evolutionary changes will bring back to the city (or retain there) middle-class blacks, newcomers from other countries, and millions of members of the white middle class who have lived in the suburbs for most of their lives, whether in childhood, youthful family nurturing, or childless middle age. I am personally skeptical of any significant revival of population in the center among blacks and immigrants. Everything the census tells us suggests that a majority among these groups, for a variety of reasons, wants to leave the center and settle outside city borders. If there is a fifth migration, I would hold that it will be very largely a migration of the white upper middle class.
Fishman does not attach specific numbers to his urban migration, so it is difficult to gauge just how large a cohort of migrants he is talking about. One thing that seems clear is that he is not talking about a new American urbanism built on the massive construction of urban skyscrapers located within classic downtown borders. It is possible to talk about a twenty-first-century skyscraper urbanism in a few North American cities, but in the much larger number of semisuccessful cities whose populations range from 250,000 to about a million, forests of new downtown towers seem unlikely, whatever the larger appeal of the fifth migration might be. There is limited land available for building these skyscrapers, difficulty (at least for a while) obtaining the rents or mortgages that make them profitable, and backlogs of empty units that need to be filled up before new ones can be constructed.
So it will turn out that much of the burden of the fifth migration will fall on the neighborhoods just beyond or reasonably close to downtown, regions that, as Mumford pointed out in the 1920s, long suffered from the annoyance of noise and congestion, the odors of industrialism, and the scourge of violent crime. We have already seen this in several places: in Sheffield in Chicago; in the rebuilding of the Fourth Ward in Houston; in the inner communities of Brooklyn in the first decade of the new century. We have also seen places where it will be very difficult to achieve, such as some of the neighborhoods just north of Center City in Philadelphia.
But when it comes to demographic inversion, the importance of the movement rests on the character of the new population group rather than on its size. There are those who predict that the distant exurbs that proved so attractive in the late twentieth century will turn into the slums of 2030. At the risk of repeating myself, I would argue something softer. I think the exurbs will be ports of entry for newcomers and minorities who will either not be attracted to, or not be able to afford, life in the center of a metropolitan area. This is what demographic inversion is about. It is why Chicago in 2030 will look more like the Paris of 1910 than like the Detroit of 1970.
Anyone who doubts that the adults of the coming generation will be making new sorts of choices need only look, as we did earlier, at raw demographics. For one thing, they guarantee a vast increase in the number of people over age sixty-five—the current baby boomers. The proportion of the U.S. population over sixty-five right now is about 13 percent. In 2030, it will be 19 percent. Tens of millions of these people will choose to stay where they are, to age in place. Others will move to a city center or its environs. But scarcely any will be buying large, detached single-family houses thirty miles from the city limits. No matter what young people may choose to do, the market for these houses is going to be limited. There will be a demand for them among some younger families and immigrants with children who are seeking more space. But the likelihood of an increased net demand for homes in exurban subdivisions is small.
Similarly, according to Professor Nelson, only about a quarter of American households in 2030 will be raising children. This compares to the roughly 50 percent that were doing so in the 1950s. Twenty years from now, there will be more single-member households than households with children. They will not all want to live in high-rise condominiums downtown. But to assume that they will maintain the demand for exurban single-family housing that existed before 2008 seems misguided.
Nelson believes that the percentage of Americans who are home owners of any sort will itself decline substantially. The American home ownership rate reached an all-time high of 69 percent in 2004 amid the ownership promotion programs of the Bush administration. Given demographic trends that are not subject to alteration, it is reasonable to expect a rate as low as 60 percent in the next decade or two.
One symbol of change, and to a certain extent of demographic inversion, is the remarkable reversal in the urban-suburban ratio of housing starts over the past two decades. In 1990, according to statistics compiled by John Thomas of the Environmental Protection Agency, the share of new residential housing permits in the New York metropolitan area that were awarded within New York City itself was 15 percent. In 2007, it was 55 percent. During that same period, the central-city permit share went from 7 percent to 40 percent in Chicago, and from 4 percent to 14 percent in Atlanta. In the depths of a housing recession, of course, there are relatively few permits being issued anywhere. But there is good reason to believe that the trends of the 1990s and 2000s will resume rather than reverse themselves.
OVER THE COURSE of this book I have avoided using the term “gentrification” except in a select number of places. This is for two reasons. One is that “gentrification” long ago became a word at the center of urban ideological debate, with those against it arguing that the return of affluent white residents to city centers was unfairly displacing impoverished minority renters, and those in favor of it insisting that it was gradually restoring the economic and social vitality of cities as a whole.
The other reason is that what is happening in American cities, most visibly in such places as Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, is a much larger force than the coming of “gentry” to previously dilapidated neighborhoods. We are witnessing a rearrangement of population across entire metropolitan areas. “Gentrification” is too small a word for it. As I indicated at the beginning, “demographic inversion” comes closer to capturing the scope of what is going on.
Nevertheless, there are those in urban sociology who have argued for years that gentrification is the equivalent of mass displacement, and those in the same field who have denied that this is so. There is a song that goes back to the 1970s:
I woke up this morning
I looked next door
There was one family living where there once were four
I got the gentrifi-gentrification blues.
The word “gentrification” was actually invented in 1963 by the British sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the “invasion” of working-class urban neighborhoods by the wealthy. By the 1970s, there were two common theories of how gentrification actually worked. One was a demand-based theory that singles, couples, and disillusioned suburbanites provided an unmistakable critical-mass base for urban recolonization, and that developers were simply responding to it. The other, a supply-based concept, assumed that developers create a market for luxury living on unused inner-city land, and gradually convince those amenable to try living there.
I am not sure it is a debate that makes much sense. Developers respond to demand, and customers respond to supply. There is no need for these theories to be mutually exclusive, or even competitive. What matters is that the people have been coming since the 1970s, and the trend will continue. As Rowland Atkinson wrote in Urban Studies in 2008, “The bear pit of gentrification debates over the past four decades has not tended to be accompanied by significant attempts at creating reliable and useful estimates of its social harm.”
What is new in the past decade is a collection of thorough studies, mostly by urban scholars Lance Freeman of Columbia and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University, concluding that the arrival of affluent newcom
ers to a neighborhood does only a small amount of damage to neighborhood life; it brings more benefits than it takes away. Vigdor argues that the rate of residential turnover in poorer black neighborhoods tends to be very high regardless of whether the affluent are arriving or not. He concludes there is little evidence that the rate spikes significantly higher when gentrification occurs. A 2002 study by the American Housing Survey reported that only about 4 to 5 percent of relocations in American neighborhoods in general are caused by displacement.
FOR STUDENTS of cities and community, perhaps the final intriguing question is what demographic inversion will do to the structure of urban life in general. Will the enhanced street vitality and personal contact that are already occurring in many of America’s largest cities bring about a return to the casual social cohesiveness that Jane Jacobs wrote about in 1961? Or will the immense changes in human technological communication diminish the ultimate importance of the street life that seems to be a magnet for so many youthful newcomers in the first place?
When Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of American Cities, there were only two methods of real-time personal communication. One was the telephone. The other was face-to-face human interaction. The forms of communication that the microchip has wrought are so fast and so current as to make detailed explanation unnecessary. Our relationship with the person we run into on the street, possibly several times a day, the contact that Jacobs valued, has been compromised by iPods, cell phones, iPhones, e-mail, social media, and other devices Jacobs could not imagine in her wildest dreams.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 24