Demographic inversion and Jane Jacobs
Alan Ehrenhalt at The New Republic argues that for all the media’s focus on the war and gentrification, it has missed the larger story of demographic inversion. The flipside of gentrification of the inner city, he rightly argues, is the movement of poorer and less white residents to the outer limits of cities. He then argues that the future of the city is not a complete demographic inversion, since there is and will continue to be an insufficient supply of downtown residences. Nor will there be gated communities in the center, since young people are seeking more openness than they experienced growing up in suburbs. Instead:
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.
I think he’s generally correct in his predictions, but that does not mean that there aren’t serious issues with his argument. Most evident is that his argument emphasizes that one cannot look at the question of inner city without considering what is happening outside it, but that is exactly what he does. He only discusses the emergence of “goat cheese quesadillas” in gentrifying neighborhoods of the inner city, the appearance of strollers on Wall Street on Saturday mornings and $24 steaks near the IUC campus. The discussion of the lives of the other half are limited to the fact that they are moving to the suburbs and that in a huge snowstorm they will be the ones to get the first seats on the subway, while wealthier residents closer to the city must wait on the platform. Clearly, a great victory for the disadvantaged and worth a $24 steak any day of the week.
The other issue I’d like to draw attention to is the claim that downtowns will not be gated. To the contrary, they already are. Doormen protect large buildings. Surveillance cameras, racial profiling, and aggressive policing create a virtual fence around downtown. This eliminates the need for gaudy, politically incorrect gates (but see post-9/11 construction guidelines for large buildings in NYC, Coaffee (1997?) on congestion pricing technology, and Setha Low on control of public spaces). Instead, suburban youth move to the “gritty city” that resembles the shopping malls in which they probably spent much of their youth more than the realities of the emerging poor outskirts.
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