Something very important and very exciting is happening in America’s cities. It’s no longer just happening in a few hot coastal cities like New York and Seattle, but has spread to a host of older industrial cities in the nation’s heartland, to places like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit. Well-educated young millennials are flocking to these cities in unprecedented numbers, and areas like Harbor East in Baltimore and Washington Avenue in St. Louis are throbbing with energy and excitement. In St. Louis, a new apartment building called the Orion has just opened in the city’s Central West End, a neighborhood once on the shabby side but now tony. It has a Whole Foods on the ground floor, and the rent for the top-of-the-line apartments is over $5,000 per month, a lot more than what the average family in St. Louis makes in a month. Yet people are moving to St. Louis and paying those rents.
Downtowns are coming to life. Hundreds of one-time office buildings, warehouses, and factories have been converted into apartments and condominiums; new stores, restaurants, and night spots have opened up. Only a few years ago, Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main drag, was deserted after 5:00 p.m. Now it is bustling with life and activity well into the night. The factories are gone, but universities and medical centers are creating thousands of new jobs. Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh are spinning off tech start-ups and cutting-edge self-driving-car research. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore have become global tourist destinations.
This isn’t happening everywhere. Some of these cities are doing a lot better than others, and small cities like Flint or Dayton are still struggling. But for a lot of cities once all but given up for dead by politicians and pundits, the cities that people are starting to call America’s “legacy cities,” the last fifteen or twenty years have seen a remarkable transformation.
It adds up to a complex, exciting, yet deeply troubling picture. The revival is real. Across the United States, people no longer see cities as a problem but as places of opportunity and vitality. The mere idea that tens of thousands of talented young people, in many respects the best and brightest of their generation, would actively choose to live in cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh is exciting, particularly for those of us who can remember how city after city fell apart during the 1960s and 1970s as neighborhoods burned down and millions fled.
Yet that excitement is badly tarnished by the reality that in the process, these cities are turning into places of growing inequality, increasingly polarized between rich and poor, white and black, with unsettling implications for their present and future. Some areas have rebounded strongly from the mortgage bust and the Great Recession, but others are falling further behind. Some neighborhoods have been revived or gentrified, but others have become poorer and more dilapidated. In St. Louis, it’s only a short walk north from the glittering Central West End to block after block of poverty, abandoned houses, and vacant lots. Cities have more rich people and neighborhoods, and more poor ones, but fewer in the middle. Thousands of new jobs have been created, but fewer and fewer of the cities’ residents are working. Housing prices have risen faster than incomes, and tenants face crushing cost burdens. The median tenant in Baltimore spent 30 percent of her income for rent in 2000; by 2015, that had risen to nearly 40 percent. When mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio described New York City in 2013 as “a place that … has become a tale of two cities,” he could have been speaking about any large city in the United States.1
From one legacy city to the next, as some areas gentrify, many other neighborhoods, including many that were pretty solid, relatively stable working-class or middle-class neighborhoods until fairly recently, are falling off a social and economic cliff. More often than not, the hardest-hit neighborhoods are disproportionately African American. Black neighborhoods saw more subprime lending and more foreclosures, are less likely to have recovered from the housing bust and the recession, and less likely to be seeing in-migration, whether through gentrification or otherwise. Thousands of African American homeowners are losing what little wealth they had and are seeing their neighborhoods fall apart around them. If you rely on the media, you might think that gentrification is the big story of American cities in the twenty-first century, but that has more to do with the fact that most of our information comes out of a handful of coastal cities where it really is the big story, places like Washington, DC, or Seattle. Gentrification may be happening in a few corners of Detroit, but the big story in that city—even if it doesn’t get the attention it deserves—is the persistence of concentrated, debilitating poverty and the decline of once-healthy, vital neighborhoods.
Some of this reflects national trends—the shift from manufacturing, with the loss of solid working-class jobs and the decline of the industrial unions—all factors that have led the middle class, in economist Robert Samuelson’s words, to be “hollowed out, as more Americans find themselves in either upper- or lower-income households. The extremes grow at the expense of the center.”2 A parallel phenomenon is known as “economic sorting,” in which neighborhoods have tended to become either richer or poorer, with fewer left in the middle. Yet broad national trends tend to be magnified in the older cities, where poverty and wealth confront one another in the next block, across the street, or on the sidewalk.
American cities have always had rich and poor. In 1890, reformer Jacob Riis wrote, with his anger and indignation vividly coming through, that “three-fourths of [New York’s] people live in the tenements … the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion.”3
That was a reality, although to be fair, far more people were able to live decent lives and raise healthy children in those tenements than Riis ever gave them credit for, while conditions in most other industrial cities, where most people lived in their own houses, perhaps with a roomer or two, were rarely as bad as in New York. At the same time, though, others flaunted their wealth to such an extent that the era has come to be known as the “Gilded Age”—an age of excess and corruption, lavish banquets at Delmonico’s and pretentious seafront “cottages” in Newport.
While inequality grew worse in the 1920s and persisted through the Great Depression, after World War II the United States moved toward greater equality as we became a nation in which more and more people were fundamentally middle-class, and fewer either particularly wealthy or poor. Experts estimate that when Jacob Riis was writing, as many as two out of three Americans lived in poverty.4 By the end of World War II, it was one of three, and by 1973, that number had been cut by two-thirds, to 11 percent. This is a remarkable transformation. Since 1980, though, as Thomas Piketty and others have taught us, we have steadily moved back to the inequality of the Gilded Age, nowhere more than in the nation’s older cities.
There are three dimensions to inequality in American cities—spatial, economic, and racial—all closely related. Baltimore shows this starkly. In 2015, the median house sales price in Baltimore was about $75,000. In twenty-nine census tracts, about one out of seven, the median price was over $200,000, as shown in the map on the left (fig. 0-1).5 In the national picture, $200,000 isn’t that much for a house. In 2015, it was about 10 percent less than the national median sales price for existing homes, which, according to the National Association of Realtors, was $222,400. But it’s a lot for Baltimore. These areas are tightly concentrated: about half wrap around the Inner Harbor, while the other half include a cluster around Johns Hopkins University and historically upscale Roland Park and Mount Washington to the north. This small area, where 15 percent of the city’s population lives, contains almost half of the total residential real estate value in the city.
Sales price over $200,000 in 2015
African American population share under 25 percent
Figure 0-1 Sales Price and Race in Baltimore. (Source: PolicyMap)
As the map on the right shows, though, these areas are not only the most expensive and most affluent areas in the city, they are also, with few exceptions, the whitest. In a city that is nearly two-thirds African American, the population of the high-value, high-income census tracts is almost 90 percent white. None of them are majority black, and only two tracts are over one-third African American. One local blogger calls it the “white L” surrounded by the “Black Butterfly.”6
Baltimore is typical. In some respects, these cities are increasingly integrated. Black faces are prominent in the most modest and the most upscale restaurants and boutiques. More than one hundred African American families live in Roland Park, Baltimore’s ritziest neighborhood. At the same time, in Baltimore and elsewhere, most areas tend to be either predominately white or predominately black. The ones that are more mixed tend to form a penumbra around the edges of largely African American neighborhoods; there are fewer of them, and they are often in transition from one form of racial preponderance to the other.
Why is this happening? Why is the revival of America’s industrial cities leading to such an increase in racial, economic, and spatial polarization? There are so many different reasons, as to suggest that this outcome was all but inevitable. Some of these are baked into larger trends, such as demographic shifts in the American population or global economic trends, while some reflect what’s been taking place in the cities themselves, like the outward flow of the African American middle class. At the same time, still others reflect political and economic choices; in other words, the outcomes might have been different if the people with the power to make decisions and control the resources had made those decisions and spent those resources differently.
Demographic change has both helped and harmed in different ways. The influx of single, childless, college-educated people in their twenties and thirties, whom I call Young Grads, eager to be part of a diverse, vital urban scene and increasingly inclined to defer marriage and childrearing, is the fuel that has revived downtowns and selected neighborhoods in city after city. At the same time, the erosion of the middle class, particularly the traditional childrearing married-couple family that was historically the norm in American urban neighborhoods, has all but undone the neighborhoods that make up much of the rest of the city. The number of children in the cities, particularly those from middle- and upper-income families, has continued to decline. Not unreasonably, urban commentator Joel Kotkin has called the twenty-first-century city a “post-familial city,” a city that is “increasingly childless and focused on the individual.”7
The erosion of the middle class, although a national phenomenon, has had a far greater impact on older cities than on the rest of the country. For decades, poor schools, aging housing, fear of crime, and deteriorating public services have driven families who could afford it to move from the cities to the suburbs. And even as Young Grads have begun to fill up empty buildings in downtown neighborhoods, families continue to move to the suburbs. In recent decades, despite an often powerful emotional commitment to their cities, more and more African American families have decided to make that move.
One-time industrial powerhouses have seen their local economies go through wrenching change. Cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo were icons of America’s industrial might, manufacturing cities above everything else. Factories sustained the local economy, and, after the union battles of the 1930s, the Wagner Act and postwar prosperity, the jobs they offered ensured that working-class men with little formal education could earn enough to support a family with dignity and become part of the middle class. Those jobs are all but gone, and most of the people who hold the few good factory jobs that still exist in places like Detroit or Cleveland today live in the suburbs.
That story is partly about globalization and the changing nature of manufacturing, but it’s mainly about the cities themselves. Manufacturing is alive and well in the United States, but not in the cities that were the cradle of America’s industrial might. Companies walked away from obsolete plants in congested urban areas for modern plants where they could operate more efficiently and hire a cheaper nonunion workforce to replace the well-paid workers they left behind. A lot of new factories have opened since the 1980s in the United States, but they aren’t in the older cities, or for the most part in Northeastern or Midwestern states. They are in the South and West, in Texas, California, and South Carolina. While automation has reduced the number of factory jobs, manufacturing is still going strong in the United States—but not in Detroit, Buffalo, or Flint.
In the more fortunate cities, like Baltimore and Pittsburgh, burgeoning global universities and medical centers have substituted in some ways for their lost factories, but as they’ve done so, they’ve drawn from an increasingly suburban, well-educated workforce. Factory workers, who were proud of their work and were part of a rich, multilayered culture built around the factory, the union, and the neighborhood, have found themselves adrift in a new and alien environment. City residents who lack specialized skills and college degrees have found themselves out in the cold, often quite literally in the case of those who now commute long hours to poorly paying jobs in suburban Walmarts, shopping malls, and nursing homes.
America’s legacy cities are old places in a country where many people have always preferred things to be new and shiny. Age and history may be a draw in walkable downtowns and historic districts with Victorian houses, but those areas are only a small part of each city. Houses in cities outside the reviving, gentrifying core are also old—even in the newest areas they tend to be over fifty years old—and usually suffer from deferred maintenance, or they need substantial repairs. Most are ordinary, and often have only one bathroom. They have postage-stamp yards and are far smaller than what most of today’s homeowners are looking for.
Even where the houses themselves might appeal to middle-class families, the neighborhoods they are part of may be less appealing, with struggling schools, endemic crime and disorder, crumbling streets and sidewalks, neglected parks, and public services that are erratic at best. Meanwhile, just around the corner from every legacy city are one or more inner-ring suburbs that, while not without their own problems, are at least somewhat safer, with schools that are (or are perceived to be) better, and where houses are affordable to almost any family earning at least $30,000 or so, the minimum that makes one a credible candidate for homeownership, whatever the price of the house.
Powerful as these changes have been, this transformation was far from simply a matter of inevitable social and economic change. All of the changes were paralleled by public policies that led to disinvestment in the cities, razed vital black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal or the interstate highway system, and promoted suburbanization for white people through racial covenants and FHA restrictions—while locking African Americans and poor people in central cities, and starving those cities of the resources they need to provide the services their residents and workers need. While much of this is in the past, its legacy still haunts the cities; even today, state legislatures still roll back even modest efforts by cities like Cleveland or St. Louis to improve conditions for their workers by raising minimum wages or requiring local hiring on construction projects.
All of this adds up to a complicated, seemingly contradictory picture. In the 1970s and 1980s, neighborhood decline was seen not unreasonably as part and parcel of the overall economic decline of the nation’s older cities. Now these cities are seeing levels of investment and activity beyond the wildest hopes of those decades, yet at the same time large segregated, poverty-stricken ghettoes house thousands of people for whom revival has brought little new hope or opportunity, and once-healthy neighborhoods of modest, well-tended homes are turning into the slums of tomorrow. The tide is rising, but it’s not lifting many boats.
It’s not that people in these cities don’t know what’s going on. In contrast to the national media and some urban pundits, who have difficulty grappling with complexity, and tend to look at cities either as dystopian settings for Robocop movies or as feel-good comeback stories, plenty of local people get it. And thousands of them have brought amazing energy and determination to their efforts to make their cities better places not just for upscale millennials but for everyone. Yet for all of their hard work and small wins, it’s just not working. We need to admire their efforts and celebrate their achievements, but we also need to drill down to understand why, for all their hard work over many decades, things are not getting better, and even the cities where revitalization efforts are working continue to become more and more polarized places with more rich people and more poor people and fewer in the middle, more upscale neighborhoods but also more poor, struggling, or neglected ones.
And we have to ask, if all our efforts are barely making a dent, what that means for the future of America’s older, once-industrial cities. Because these cities matter. Not only do millions of people live in America’s legacy cities, and even more millions in suburbs that are inextricably linked to those cities and their future, but also, because as America becomes more urban, cities are increasingly regaining their historic role as the economic engines of their states and their regions. As the United States grapples with the difficult challenges of the twenty-first century, to paraphrase Eldridge Cleaver, our cities can be part of the solution to those challenges—or part of the problem itself.
Today, America’s once industrial and now postindustrial cities appear to be on a trajectory to a future in which they become more and more polarized places where bustling, glittering enclaves of prosperity are ringed by declining or largely abandoned areas, and where millions are relegated to lives of poverty and hopelessness. These cities are at a crossroads. There is no inherent reason why today’s trends could not continue to the point where American cities may resemble the Jakarta that David Smith describes: where behind “the veneer of great commercial activity, prosperity, and growth, … in the less visible parts of the city—in slums off the main avenues and sprawling squatter settlements and shantytowns on the outskirts of the metropolitan area—the masses of Jakartans live starkly different lives.”8
This is not a future that we should aspire to, either for our cities or as a nation. In the heyday of these cities’ industrial prosperity at the beginning of the twentieth century, these cities were also economically polarized places, where the rich lived in mansions and the poor in tiny row houses and tenements. But for all their dirt, grime, and poverty, they were first and foremost places of opportunity, places that propelled the mass of Americans into the middle class and created a standard of living for our nation that became the model for the rest of the world.
The problem is not that today’s American cities have poor people living in them. The problem is that the cities have largely stopped being places of opportunity where poor people come to change their lives, and that today’s poor and their children remain poor, locked out of the opportunities the cities offer. The most pressing question facing the cities is whether that can change, and whether, as they continue to revive, they can once again become the places of hope and opportunity they once were.
This is what this book is about. It is the story of what has really been going on in America’s older industrial cities since the turn of the millennium, why it is happening, what that means for their future, and how, I believe, the path they are on can be changed. That story begins with the large economic, social, and demographic changes that are driving the transformation of these cities, but it doesn’t end there. It is about how those changes relate to the complexities of race, poverty, and power, and how those complexities translate into the changing reality on the ground. It is about how real cities like Detroit and Baltimore, and real neighborhoods in those cities, have become very different places from what they were only a short while ago, and how that in turn has changed the lives of the people who live in those cities and neighborhoods.
In chapter 1 of the book I set the stage, describing how America’s industrial cities became such potent centers of prosperity and opportunity, and then how, after World War II, they fell into the long decline from which they have only begun to revive. The next two chapters look at the broad changes in American society and the economy that have most powerfully driven the change in the cities. In chapter 2, I show how changing demographics and consumer preferences, including the rise of the millennial generation, the decline in the traditional married-couple family, and the rise of immigration have fundamentally changed the character of the cities and their neighborhoods, while in chapter 3, I show how, as the factories closed, new economic sectors, most prominently health care and higher education, came to dominate these cities’ economies.
The next three chapters might be summed up as “space and race”; they look at the shifting neighborhood dynamics of legacy cities. Chapter 4 begins where any serious discussion of the American city needs to begin—with the persistent significance of race, as seen not least in the persistence and spread of urban ghettos (racially defined areas of concentrated, multigenerational poverty) in the midst of the urban revival, and how the pernicious legacy of racial discrimination and segregation is still a powerful force, just below the surface. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”9 Chapter 5 is about gentrification. I look at what is actually happening, how it is affecting neighborhoods and their residents, and at the critical subtext underlying why it has become such an intense, polarizing controversy. Chapter 6, then, looks at the opposite side of the coin, which is the widespread decline of neighborhoods that were until recently vital places, and the many forces working to undermine their vitality.
Chapter 7 changes the focus to ask a very different but also difficult question. I look at why the hundreds of smaller once-industrial cities, factory towns, and aging suburbs are falling so badly behind their bigger-city counterparts, and I try to explain why size matters so much more in today’s economy than in these places’ heyday. In the next chapters, I move on to look at how people have tried to tackle the critical challenges faced by the older industrial cities. In chapter 8, I look at how cities, community development corporations, and others are trying to reverse neighborhood decline and breathe new life into disinvested, struggling neighborhoods, and I grapple with some of the reasons why their efforts have largely been unsuccessful, while in chapter 9, I look at the reasons for the opportunity gap and the persistence of poverty, and the efforts, often remarkably successful, that people have made to bridge the gap through education and training, as well as some of the reasons why those efforts haven’t spread further than they have.
The last two chapters turn back to the big issues that I’ve laid out in these pages. Chapter 10 explores how each city’s course is driven by local policies and decisions, how those decisions in turn reflect the power dynamics of the city, what that means in terms of how we should think about equity and opportunity, and why all successful strategies must, in the final analysis, be local strategies. Finally, in chapter 11, I offer a body of broad, far-reaching, and in a few cases perhaps controversial recommendations aimed at bringing about greater equity and opportunity, while simultaneously sustaining the legacy cities’ revival. Their revival, although real, is still fragile; yet, unless that revival is sustained, few of the opportunities of which people dream can ever become a reality.
I believe that far greater equity and inclusion are achievable, and that cities can once again be places of hope and opportunity for the many, not just the few. It will be a far more complicated task, though, than either the liberal mantra of more programs and more money—although that can help—or the conservative mantra of unleashing the unbridled power of the market—although the market is an important part of the picture—would have us believe. I do not want to join the crowd of people offering laundry lists of federal programs or simplistic invocations of the market, nor do I want to offer utopian solutions no more plausible than the rise of Atlantis from the bottom of the sea. Instead, I ask what must happen to change a trajectory that is both driven by powerful social, economic, and demographic forces, and tied to equally powerful realities of power and politics.
Those realities are national and global, but also intensely, powerfully local. America’s cities are actors, not merely passive bystanders or victims. The federal government can help in myriad ways, but ultimately, the decisions that determine whether people are included or excluded, and whether opportunity becomes a reality for those who have been left behind by revival, will be made locally by local actors. What that means, in turn, is that any successful movement for equity and opportunity must be above all a local movement—or rather, hundreds of separate local movements. It will be a long, hard slog, city by city and metro by metro. It will be a struggle, but one well worth the effort. It is part of the struggle for the soul of our country.