How our cities are changing

Alan Ehrenhalt at The New Republic has an excellent article on how cities in the United States are changing. Using his home town as a case study:

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna 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--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

Ehrenhalt has three major reasons why this shift is happening:

1. The deindustrialization of city centre

• We no longer manufacture goods in city cores like we used to. My own office building is a converted turn-of-the-(last)-century manufacturing facility.

2. Random street violence is down

• Compared to the 1970s and 80s, street violence in downtown cores have dramatically decreased.

3. Young people want to live in these areas

• As a teacher of undergraduate students at the University of Richmond, Ehrenhalt would ask his (mostly suburban-bred) students where they would prefer to live within 15 years: in a suburb or in the center of a city. Very few preferred the suburban lifestyle.

On the city of Vancouver, where 20 percent of the population lives within a couple of square miles away from one another in the city's centre:

Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.

It's a great article. Read it here.