The 1960s, the years when I went to college and entered the work world, were the era of the civil rights movement. They were also the era of urban renewal. The two came together for me when, as a Yale undergraduate, I joined the New Haven chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality and began to investigate the living conditions of people in neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal. I saw how the city was using federal dollars to buy up the homes of mostly poor people in mostly African American neighborhoods, and in the process had become the city’s biggest slumlord. Hundreds of these people were living in squalor, neglected by the city, often without heat and other basic needs.
During those years, I also learned how pessimistic people in New Haven were about their city’s future; I realized that for the city’s politicians, urban renewal, even as it was undermining the city’s neighborhoods, was a desperate roll of the dice in the hope that it might, somehow, alter what they saw as an otherwise inexorable path of decline. In those days, Yale was far from the economic powerhouse it is today. Officials saw no alternative other than to double down on what New Haven, in their eyes, had always been—an industrial city with a busy commercial downtown. Local officials convinced the city’s two department stores to move to shiny new buildings, and persuaded some of the city’s remaining factories to move to shiny new industrial parks, all on land cleared with federal dollars—but it didn’t last. During the seventies and eighties the department stores closed, as did most of the factories.
When I think back to the sixties and seventies, I remember how daunting, even hopeless, the fate of the cities seemed. With riots seemingly a fixture of the urban landscape, whites fleeing the cities, and suburban shopping malls and office parks filling up with the stores and companies that had once been downtown, older cities all seemed to be on the same path of inexorable decline. As for myself, I spent much of my time during the seventies and eighties trying help poor people escape from the cities, by fighting suburban zoning barriers and trying to build affordable housing in the places to which those stores and companies had moved.
That changed in the nineties, when I went to work for the City of Trenton, New Jersey, as its director of housing and economic development. Despite being New Jersey’s state capital, Trenton was basically an old factory town; in fact, it was much like New Haven without Yale. Once a manufacturing powerhouse, by 1990 it had lost most of its factories along with one-third of its population, and its downtown stores had gone out of business or decamped for suburban malls on Route One. I could no longer think of cities like Trenton as someone else’s problem. Now they were my problem.
What I did and didn’t do is not part of this story; I had some successes and some failures, got some things right and some things wrong. I also learned a lot about what was going on in Trenton and similar cities elsewhere in the United States, and I developed a fierce conviction that these places mattered. I left Trenton in 1999 after eight years on the job. Since then I’ve been spending most of my time visiting America’s older once-industrial cities—as well as quite a few in Europe—listening to people, looking at a lot of data (I’m a numbers geek), and thinking and writing about them. It’s been a great experience. I’ve seen a lot of interesting places, and made a lot of wonderful friends. From the beginning, though, I spent most of my time not in glamorous cities like New York or San Francisco, but in gritty cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Flint. This book is about those cities, and it comes out of that experience.
I started my travels right at the turn of the millennium. At that point, there were a lot of signs that things might be picking up. More people were buying houses in cities like Newark and Cleveland. Property values were moving up. In 2000, I went to a forum in Washington, DC, held by the now-long-defunct Fannie Mae Foundation, where I heard one of the top housing market researchers in the county tell us that “the cities had the wind at their back” for the first time in recent memory. Only a few years later, though, it was becoming increasingly clear that a lot of that wind was coming from speculation and the subprime lending frenzy. Subprime mortgages grew rapidly as a part of the urban housing market starting around 2000, driving home prices in a lot of cities to levels that could not possibly be supported by the people living there. All of that came crashing to an end around 2006 or 2007.
At that point, with home prices plummeting and foreclosures rising exponentially, a lot of people wondered what would happen to the nascent urban boom. True, not everything I and others had observed during the previous years was fluff. Developers were rehabbing old factory buildings in Cleveland’s Warehouse District and along Washington Avenue in St. Louis, putting up new houses in Chicago’s Wicker Park, or constructing new apartment buildings in Center City Philadelphia. People, mostly young and childless, were moving into these places, and new stores and restaurants catering to their tastes were opening around them. Still, as foreclosures mounted, banks retrenched, and the nation fell into the Great Recession, I wasn’t the only one wondering whether the first years of the new millennium would turn out to be just one more short-lived blip on the long downward urban trajectory that had begun after World War II.
Ten years later, as I write this, the answer is clear. It was not a blip, it was real. In many parts of the nation’s older cities, in downtowns, around universities, and in neighborhoods like Shaw in St. Louis or Fells Point in Baltimore, demand came roaring back, led by young, well-educated millennials, a species for whom cities have become the natural habitat. Their habitat has steadily expanded; in Baltimore it has expanded beyond Fells Point, moving east along the inner harbor to Patterson Park and beyond, and west from the Johns Hopkins campus into Hampden and Woodbury. In Pittsburgh, it’s moved up along the Allegheny River from downtown through the Strip District and into Lawrenceville. Million-dollar row houses and condos have become almost commonplace in Philadelphia, along with apartments where the monthly rent is higher than the monthly income of most Philadelphians. And people are moving to Philadelphia, buying those houses, and paying those rents.
Detroit, the largest American city ever to declare bankruptcy, is exuding new life. When I visited Detroit in 2003, and again in 2008, the city’s downtown was all but deserted, as if people had turned the lights off and just walked away. I remember in 2003 standing in the middle of Grand Circus, a semi-circular downtown park ringed by handsome 1920s office towers, admiring the park’s elegant landscaping; then, I looked upward, and realized that all the towers surrounding the park were empty shells. No longer. With a hefty assist from billionaire Dan Gilbert, downtown Detroit has begun to shine. One of the empty office buildings I saw on Grand Circus in 2003 is now the Aloft Detroit Hotel, where rooms go for close to $300 a night.
But something seemed badly off about this picture. By this point I was doing quite a bit of research on these cities, and one project powerfully brought what was going on home to me. A few years ago, I set out to map the extent of Milwaukee’s gentrification. (I don’t particularly like that word, because different people use it to mean so many different things, but I’ll use it for now, and try to unpack its meanings in chapter 5.) When I looked at Milwaukee, I defined gentrifying census tracts as those that were low-income in 2000, and which showed above-average rates of increase in both household incomes and house prices from 2000 to 2012. Using that yardstick, I found a small cluster of tracts on the west bank of the Milwaukee River across from downtown that could be called “gentrifying.” Not many. The entire area contained only about 1 percent of the city’s population.
Then, I flipped the question. How many other areas had declined, I wondered, at the same rate that the gentrifying areas had improved, over the same period? The answer stunned me. At the same time that only a handful of the city’s low-income census tracts were gentrifying, nearly half of the rest were getting poorer. It wasn’t just that they weren’t improving, but actually getting worse. People’s incomes and the value of their homes, adjusted for inflation, were actually going down. The same was true in the city’s middle-income neighborhoods, areas where people’s incomes were roughly the same as the citywide average. Nearly half of them had lost significant ground since 2000; they too were getting poorer, and their homes were worth less. The only parts of Milwaukee—except for the gentrifying 1 percent—that had gained ground were the ones that were affluent to begin with.
I’m not picking on Milwaukee. The same pattern holds true in most of America’s older industrial cities, to varying degrees. And yet, wherever I went in these cities, what people were talking about—shouting about, really—was gentrification. I had stumbled onto the cities’ dirty secret, something a Detroit friend described to me as “the biggest problem nobody’s talking about.” Yes, the revival was real—all the hype was more or less true. But it was only touching small parts of these cities. Most of the rest were at best treading water, and a lot were going downhill. And a big part of it was about race. Cities were becoming more segregated, more polarized between poverty and prosperity, revival and decline, and black and white. For all the excitement and glitter of Baltimore’s Harbor East, or Cleveland’s University Circle, huge parts of these cities’ people and neighborhoods were mired in poverty and despair, living surrounded by vacant lots and boarded-up houses, seeing little or nothing of their cities’ newfound prosperity.
That’s what I decided to write about. Not about New York and San Francisco, or the half-dozen or so hot coastal cities that get the headlines and dominate the blogosphere, but about the much larger number of cities in the American heartland, the former industrial cities that people are now calling “legacy cities,” places like Buffalo or Cleveland, or the even larger number of smaller cities and factory towns, like Trenton, Youngstown, or Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.
This book is their story, not a flyover book about “cities” or “urbanism” but about real places and real people. I want to describe what is going on in these cities and explain why, but I also want to make the case that segregation and inequality are not baked into their future. There is a path, however difficult and demanding it may be, to more-inclusive future cities, where everyone has a shot at opportunity and a share in their community’s prosperity. I hope this book can help bring this future a bit closer.