The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

January 23, 2012
The conventional model of the post-war American metropolis—a desolate inner city, home to impoverished minorities and immigrants, surrounded by affluent white suburbs—is turning itself inside out, according to this intriguing survey of the new urban geography. Ehrenhalt (The Lost City) examines a panorama of inner-city districts where well-heeled residents are flocking back in search of nightlife, short commutes, and dense, vibrant communities, including: Chicago’s once gang-ridden, now swanky Sheffield neighborhood; Houston’s Third Ward, in the throes of racially-charged battles over gentrification; and even sprawling, car-bound Phoenix, where a new light rail system may prove a magnet for downtown development. He contrasts these upscaling city precincts with suburbs like Ohio’s Cleveland Heights, uneasily split between leafy subdivisions and dilapidated tenements, and Georgia’s Gwinnett County, a formerly lily-white Atlanta ex-urb that’s now majority-minority thanks to a tide of Hispanic and Asian immigrant strivers. Ehrenhalt’s old-school urbanism, reminiscent of the work of Jane Jacobs, integrates fine-grained readings of street life with shrewd analyses of demographics, crime patterns, transportation systems, housing policy, and zoning and tax regulations to reveal the changing dynamics of metropolitan areas. The result is a lucid, provocative, and rather hopeful forecast for America’s cities—one that illuminates their enduring appeal. Photos. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company.

February 15, 2012
A political scientist looks at a possible "demographic inversion" in which America's cities may follow in the footsteps of late-19th-century European capitals: "affluent and stylish urban core[s] surrounded by poorer people and an immigrant working class on the periphery." With large public-housing complexes demolished and their former inhabitants pushed into the outer suburbs, young professionals, senior citizens and other groups are beginning to find their way back to older central city neighborhoods. Pew Center on the States information director Ehrenhalt's (Democracy in the Mirror: Politics, Reform and Reality in Grassroots America, 1998, etc.) main examples are Chicago's Sheffield neighborhood, which has gone from an urban wasteland to one of the city's most fashionable and desirable locations, and New York City's financial district, where commercial office buildings have been converted to residential uses and the evening streets are populated by couples with baby carriages. Ehrenhalt finds the historical parallels for this process in the renewal and reconstruction of city centers in 1890s Paris and Vienna. He also discusses cities where he doesn't think such revivals are possible, including Philadelphia and Baltimore, both of which have locally focused political structures based on privately owned row houses with small lots, and the former industrial wasteland of Detroit. Between these extremes he presents cases like Phoenix, which has tried multiple times to build a center city that never existed, and continues to fail. Ehrenhalt points to Northern Virginia's Tysons Corner--now the twelfth largest business district in the United States"--as the test case for whether a commercial strip, lacking residential development, can be transformed into a unified city-type center. The author's historical perspective helps shape his provocative view, though he doesn't examine whether the demographic trends will generate either the financing or the wider employment that Paris and Vienna were able to stimulate in their own unique ways.

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November 1, 2011

With young adults and well-off retirees flowing in, immigrants and poorer folks flowing out, and the impulse to revitalize downtowns there if sometimes still defeated by urban sprawl, America's cities are definitely changing--and sometimes swapping roles with those upstart suburbs (that's the "great inversion"). From noted urbanologist Ehrenhalt; not just for city libraries, since this new demographic affects everyone.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2012
In the future, American cities could look like late-nineteenth-century Vienna, with lively, affluent metropolitan core areas and the lower classes consigned to life in peripheral suburbs. Such cities will go well beyond gentrification and involve the displacement of the poor in inner-city areas by the wealthy, according to urbanologist Ehrenhalt. He details how the trend toward such cities is already apparent in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Houston, and other metropolitan areas. Drawing on census data and economic research, he examines the factors behind the trend, including mass transit, retail and housing development in downtown locations, and the declining appeal of long commutes to distant suburbs. Ehrenhalt also offers detailed portraits of the future of suburban sprawl in areas struggling to re-create the appeal of cities by developing more accessible commercial zones. This is an engaging look at demographic changes that promise a very different future for cities and suburbs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)