This is one of the best articles I’ve read in a while.
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.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
The most fascinating part of the article is where he discusses the reasons for young people wanting to move into urban areas not just because of their attraction to them, but because of their intense dissatisfaction with living in the suburbs they grew up in.
In twenty years I’ve watched the suburb I grew up in - a close in suburb, not an exurb - transformed from a mixed white and blue collar town, with lots of mom & pop stores and a historic-looking town center into just another set of chain stores and strip malls. With it, the town itself has gotten wealthier and more affluent. Beautiful estates that had stood for a hundred years in the old wealthy neighborhoods have been replaced with McMansions, and even many of the smaller houses are coming down and being replaced with four and five bedroom monstrosities way too big for their lots.
Now, I’m not one to denigrate capitalism or go after wal mart and home depot for putting local hardware stores out of business. But we lose something when we don’t live in places that have their own unique character. And in the last twenty years, many suburbs have become indistinguishable from each other, whether you’re comparing towns a couple miles away or on the other side of the country. This is what I think people moving into cities are searching for - the uniqueness that comes with both a major city or a small town, but not with a suburb.
However, it seems this trend may be starting to change:
Somewhere in between, there lies the vision of Jane Jacobs, who idealized the Greenwich Village of the 1950s and the casual everyday relationships that made living there comfortable, stimulating, and safe. Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in. And, by and large, I believe central cities will give it to them. Not only that, but much of suburbia, in an effort to stay afloat, will seek to urbanize itself to some extent. That reinvention is already taking place: Look at all the car-created suburbs built in the 1970s and ’80s that have created “town centers” in the past five years, with sidewalks and as much of a street grid as they can manage to impose on a faded strip-mall landscape. None of these retrofit efforts look much like a real city. But they are a clue to the direction in which we are heading.
