CHAPTER 6

Landscapes of Consumption

The fundamental observation of twenty-first-century cities is that they have become what the sociologist Sharon Zukin has called “landscapes of consumption.”1 Cities are the geographical lens through which we can observe the consumption habits of the new elites. Through their shared values, ideologies, and consumption patterns, twenty-first-century cities connect more with one another than with towns and suburbs that may be more geographically proximate. Cities have become the ultimate consumption zone for the aspirational class, where many of the behaviors and practices I have discussed thus far play out. This rise in urban consumption is the result of an influx of elites—particularly wealthy members of the aspirational class—moving back into cities and cities, which in turn, cater to their needs and desires.

To be clear, urban centers are not just nodes for the upper-income members of the aspirational class; cities are intensely desirable to all the world’s economic elite. Record-breaking apartment sales and rapid gentrification of once gritty neighborhoods are reported in newspaper headlines from New York to London to Berlin. The pushing out of dive bars and affordable housing for the influx of new condos and luxury retail is a standard trope in the twenty-first-century metropolis. In the building of this elite utopia, Western capitalist cities have become cultural and economic universes unto themselves. For every reasonably priced almond latte that an upwardly mobile member of the aspirational class purchases in Brooklyn, there is a multimillion-dollar apartment being sold to a Chinese oligarch on the Upper East Side. These two elite worlds collide in today’s Western capitalist cities. Thus, understanding the important role of cities as they pertain to the aspirational class requires studying the role of urbanity as the spatial manifestation of much of the inequality and rise of the global economic elite that underpins the world economy. To understand today’s cities is to understand what drives their desirability for the world’s elite, aspirational and otherwise, and much of this allure can be found in what people consume.

The city was not always a desirable destination for the world’s elite. Cities began as places of local trade, then export, and then with the Industrial Revolution, cities became the locus of production.2 The Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing economy brought consumption to the masses, and its geographical home was the urban center. From Frederick Engels to Jacob Riis to Georg Simmel, sociologists and economists remarked upon the city’s dire physical and social conditions as a result of factories, the tenements in which workers lived, and other elements of mass production.³ Early twentieth-century cities were marked by a rapid influx of density never before seen in Western metropolises. This density was due to the rise in production—the manufacturing economy created the capability and the subsequent demand for mass-produced material goods, which brought forth immigrant workers and tenement housing. This expansion also made cities hard places to live. Cities became untenable by the mid-twentieth century (with the rise of public health problems, overcrowding, and pollution). Thus, unsurprisingly, when the federal government offered low-interest, amortized loans for suburban home ownership, those who could, fled urban centers.⁴ The subsequent urban deindustrialization, commencing in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, left cities with no middle class and no jobs.

Those who study cities—economists, sociologists, urban planners—thought the demise would continue, that the city as we knew it would never recover. Indeed, they were partially right. Cities are no longer centers of manufacturing, and factories, which had gone to South America and Asia, did not reopen. There remains a massive plight of joblessness among unskilled, minority workers who had once been well-paid manufacturing workers. But the decline stopped. As early as the 1980s, a burgeoning advanced service economy took hold of major metro areas. While the actual production of goods left cities, an influx of firms that managed and ran the distribution of goods, services, and money began to move in. Headquarters and corporate management located in cities.⁵ While the job of making things moved to cheaper locales in developing countries, the decisions around what to make, where to sell it, and how to value it, whether on the stock market or department store aisle, were made in major cities. In fact, the very cities that had been impacted by deindustrialization—Boston, New York, Chicago—were experiencing a resurgence due to the location of headquarters, financial services, law firms, and other highly skilled service industries. This revival of cities isn’t a result of a rebirth of the industrial economy. As the London School of Economics geographer Michael Storper remarks in his book Keys to the City, “The decentralization of manufacturing essentially ended central cities’ role in it. But [it] did not put an end to urban concentration.”6

In fact, it’s hard to say what tangible things educated, urban denizens actually create. Many work in a world of ideas, highly dependent on a formal, tertiary education. In her book, Cities in a World Economy, the sociologist Saskia Sassen documents the process by which cities evolved from centers of physical production to headquarters of knowledge and financial, nonphysical capital. A confluence of several different economic changes occurred. First, globalization affected all areas of business—the outsourcing of production to developing countries with cheaper wages and materials and the business deals and exchanges across major cities around the world. Part of these business deals were linked to the rise of financial markets as a key area of profit generation and their geographical concentration in major cities. These economic interactions were characterized by instantaneous exchanges among people and firms which required centralized, dense contact that emerged in a few major global cities, including New York, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Finally, the financial industry required accompanying services (accounting, law, and public relations) in close proximity. While the rebirth of cities due to financial activities and what Sassen calls “high level producer services” occurred initially in the aforementioned centers, other cities were also experiencing the exodus of manufacturing and the influx of knowledge and innovation-driven industries, which also included technology (Boston, San Francisco) and creative industries (Los Angeles, New York).⁷

By the 2000s, cities were back in vogue. Part of what explains this phenomenon is that cities have become the nexus of the new global economic structure that prizes intangible skills, education, innovation, and creativity—Sassen’s high level producer services are the underpinnings of what others have called the “knowledge economy,” “symbolic analysts,” or the “creative class.”8 The restructuring of the global economy from widgets and factories to people and ideas most clearly impacted cities.⁹ The need for proximity to exchange ideas and the desire for instant access to the immaterial resources of density put a premium on the dense urban geography. And as cities (and specifically the companies located within them) demand more skilled workers, these labor market elites get paid more than others as a result of their education and skills, and a highly clustered pattern of affluent, educated labor market elite emerges. Around the world, the city is in the midst of a renaissance as both companies and the people who work in them are flocking back into the city.

This transformation has been rapid and profound. Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond found that between 1980 and 2000, the population of college-educated New Yorkers increased by 73%, while the population of non-college-educated decreased by 15%. This trend exists across the country in highly skilled metros where the uptick in the educated is rapid and corresponds with an erosion of lower skilled workers.¹⁰ Storper observes that from the late 1990s to early 2000s, cities in general—old, cold, sprawling, or sunny—grew as a result of firm location and the skilled labor that followed. That cities as diverse as Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have all experienced significant population growth suggests that it is not the specificity of cities but rather the qualities of urbanity—density and diversity—that maximize the work and profit-generation of the twenty-first century. Further, labor market elites have the luxury of choosing to work close to where they live, and many choose to minimize commuting time that impacts their quality of life. Again, the attributes of the city most appeal to the preferences of the new elites.¹¹ As Paul Krugman succinctly observed of the phenomenon, “In general, this high-income elite gets what it wants, and what it has wanted, since 2000, has been to live near the center of big cities.”¹²

Thus, the city has become the defining geography of the twenty-first-century aspirational class and its distinctive ways of living. These elites’ desire to live close to their place of work has catalyzed cities and their entrepreneurs to offer more restaurants, boutiques, cafés, and entertainment that reflect their values and consumer preferences. These days, people live in cities for reasons that are not simply financial or practical but rather are related to what the city at large has to offer. Inspired by the successful rehabilitation of major metros, other smaller cities like Boulder, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis also undertook a renaissance—retrofitting industrial lofts for residential living, bringing more amenities into the city, paving bike paths and pedestrian-friendly walkways to attract members of the creative class (thought to be the lifeblood of the new economy).13 Local politicians and developers advocate for active street life, coffee shops, and live music as a part of the new urbanity. Countless new-build developments around the country in both urban and suburban areas offer residential, shopping, and restaurants as a combined experience for the consumer. While some of these developments are in downtown (Zappos’ founder Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas Downtown Project, Chicago’s New City, or the Los Angeles Staples Center), many simply replicate the downtown experience with sidewalks, outdoor music, and cafés and apartments overlooking the “street life” (Santana Row in Silicon Valley, the Grove in Los Angeles, or the uber-luxury Bal Harbour shops in Florida). Some 150 years after the Industrial Revolution took hold of the metropolis, long after the last factory closed shop, the city has become the center of consumption, rather than production, of material goods.

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has spent the last few decades trying to understand this relationship between consumption and city growth. The previous understanding of cities was that they were good for production but bad for consumption. As the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath spread wholly into western cities, urban centers became overcrowded (which increased the spread of disease), environmentally polluted, and essentially taken over by commerce and production processes. Cities became, in short, unpleasant places to live. One only has to glance at Frederick Engels’s study of Manchester or read Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier to get a sense of the horrors of the industrial metropolis. Those who could leave did so. Housing stock declined as the resources and people needed to maintain it were no longer there to do so. In the United States, this exodus was further catalyzed by the US government’s FHA loans and GI Bill to support home ownership, which was primarily awarded to those purchasing homes in the suburbs. These efforts were implicitly racist through redlining and restrictive covenants, leaving out huge minority communities who were not given loans and were essentially trapped in a deteriorating urban core.14 For several decades, starting in the mid-twentieth century, cities were replaced by suburbs as the desired place to live.¹⁵

This dynamic went on for decades. But Glaeser’s work suggests the opposite is true today. Currently, the headquarters of the global economy are in major metros and their labor market elites are there too. These new elites desire dense, culturally rich neighborhoods that offer rich amenities and consumption options. Cities offering the greatest opportunities to consume are thriving. The dominant intellectual paradigm in urban economics is what is termed the New Neo-Classical Urban Economics (NNUE), which argues that individual and firm preferences around “amenity value,” or quality of life, explain the location choices of companies and labor market elites. By way of example, one of the reasons that older, industrial cities experienced a rebirth is a result of consumption options and social interaction that was attractive to highly skilled workers.¹⁶ Empirically, this theory has borne out in twenty-first-century cities: In work with fellow economists Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz, Glaeser finds that high amenity cities—those with parks, opera houses, an abundance of restaurants and retail—grew much faster than low amenity cities. In fact, the concentration of amenities in 1980 predicted subsequent population growth over the next decade. They also find that urban rents are much higher than urban wages, suggesting that the demand to live in cities can’t be explained simply by the practicality of getting paid more. But the average city dweller is willing to put up with higher rents because of what urban life has to offer. What determines a city’s success—and delineates the global urban hierarchy—is the extent to which a city offers consumption options to its inhabitants.¹⁷ As cities become important sites of skilled human capital, those who run cities and own businesses within them generate amenities that make urban living worthwhile and interesting to these highly sought-after workers.¹⁸ Thus the process of being a center of the global economy and an important consumption zone for the new elites goes in lockstep.

Glaeser and his colleagues break down amenities into four different types: local goods, aesthetics, public services, and speed. The latter three types of amenities are fairly straightforward: People like good schools and low crime and nice architecture, (reasonable) weather, and parks. People want good transportation systems like subways and bike paths and proximity to the central business district. So, on the surface, it’s no surprise that Manhattan or London, with their sprawling public space, efficient subway systems, low crime, and strong schools (if you’re in the right neighborhood) are so desirable. But it’s more complicated when it comes to the local consumer options, and importantly, the eclectic mix that one city offers versus another.

Since the post-medieval period, we have witnessed a rise in real incomes and the emergence of a post-scarcity society.19 These developments mean that, despite rising inequality, the general population in Western industrialized countries has more money and, specifically, more of it to devote to secondary and tertiary needs, after taking care of basic necessities. So the world over, most people are buying more goods. From a spatial perspective, this means that the most desirable places to live often have more desirable types of consumption. Big, “alpha” cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Paris all offer many iterations of premium consumption options: a perfect cappuccino, a meal at a good restaurant, or a designer dress. And the local influence—good curry houses in London, great pizza in Chicago, baguettes in Paris—is what makes these cities distinct in what they produce alongside the endless string of cafés and boutiques. The concentration of different people, and lots of them, is what enables the curry houses to flourish—so many people skilled to produce a particular good and so many wanting to consume it.²⁰

People themselves also become local goods that others want to be around, and their specificity and uniqueness in different cities make certain places desirable in different ways. We want to be around people with whom we can share ideas, culture, and stories, people who read the same books and watch the same movies. We are ultimately social animals and connect around a series of norms and shared identities. Part of this connectivity is an outcome of industry: those working in country music tend to live in Nashville and not only increase their productivity by working near each other and sharing ideas around composition notes or lyrics, but also tend to share an enjoyment in the same topics at dinner parties and bars. The clustering of people for work, whether finance or film or publishing, produces cohesive social groups that allow for shared identity. So, along with simply getting a job, people seek out places where the consumption of their social and personal lives is maximized.²¹

This social consumption is also how people end up meeting the people they want to date, marry, and create a family with, and with whom they form lifelong friendships. If you are a bachelor screenwriter, the prospects of your dating life are more interesting in Los Angeles than Miami; in the former, you will likely find more potential partners with whom you have things in common. Increasingly, as cities are sites of intellectual production (finance, technology, the arts) rather than industrial production, they are also the nexus where the very skilled end up meeting each other and having kids, thus becoming the ultimate power couples and producing children who grow up to become the same.22 Much of the concern around inequality stems from the social and economic bifurcation between the skilled and the less skilled and the opportunities that exist for them and future generations. The roots of this phenomenon can be traced to the dating market of urban centers (particularly as people marry like, rather than marrying “up” or “down,” a twenty-first-century trend economists term “assortative mating”²³). Smart people want to be around other smart people not just for work, but also for friendships and romantic relationships, and over time that results in highly stratified hyper-educated affluent places where, as the economist Tyler Cowen remarked, “Money and talent become clustered in high-powered, two-earner families determined to do everything possible to advance the interests of their children.”²⁴

The social and economic interplay of urban inhabitants enables and promotes cities as the ultimate sites of consumption. A sizable number of the people in today’s metropolis are more highly skilled and as a result more highly paid than most and they demand luxurious consumption options—whether art galleries, prestigious preschools, or cocktail bars. Niche entrepreneurs and multinational companies like Chanel and Cartier are responding to this desire in kind. Aside from high-end handbags and watches, the uptick in urban restaurants, bars, and even nail salons, gives people channels to spend their extra money, and makes cities all the more appealing to live in. Glaeser found that between 1998 and 2008, employment in Manhattan restaurants increased by more than 50%, suggesting that the demand for consumer options is being met with supply.²⁵

Ironically, city living and all of its rich consumption options is a relative bargain for the wealthy (even if everyone else is struggling to pay the rent; more on this later). We know that taste varies with income. Part of this observation is simply a result of rich people having more money and therefore more disposable income to spend. But the fact that in a general sense, wealthy people might seek out similar basic goods to one another—free-range chickens, organic milk, nice restaurants, and massages—means that cities as home to the affluent tend to cater to their consumption needs specifically. One need only take a short stroll around Santa Monica to see an excess of day spas, organic tea houses, vegan restaurants, and other peculiarities of the rich in action. Jessie Handbury, a professor at Wharton, calls this phenomenon “income specific tastes.” Handbury finds that wealthy people not only seek out variety in their luxury goods (for example, many may like gourmet cheese, but appreciate a selection from a variety of countries) but they also care very little about fluctuations in price. They are not paying attention to the rise in beef or milk prices that are reported in the nightly news. But by virtue of living in a city, these wealthy people are spending less on those nice goods anyway. Studying 40,000 American households and 500 food items, Handbury finds that the rich (those making more than $100,000 per year) spend 20% less on groceries in high per capita cities (New York, San Francisco) than if they lived in seemingly more affordable cities (like Detroit or Atlanta).26 Manicures are cheaper in cities: New Yorkers spend $3 less on a manicure than any of the other top ten biggest cities.²⁷ The luxury of consumption offered by cities starts to look pretty lopsided: Not only do urban denizens have more consumer options but they also pay less for them.

Underpinning these findings are the basics of microeconomics: economies of scale and scope. Or, simply put, in urban centers there are plenty of people who will partake in the same types of consumption (economies of scale) to uphold amenities like baseball stadiums, opera houses, and theaters and will drive down fixed costs for expenditures such as massages, organic food, and happy hour. Simultaneously, there are enough people that the “long tail” of consumption (economies of scope)—ethnic restaurants, high-end boutiques, and avant-garde theater—will also be in demand. This interplay of significant demand for the same things and the large sum of idiosyncrasies that emerge from having so many people with diverse backgrounds and preferences in the same place is what propels so many choices in urban centers. The sheer number of diverse inhabitants both drives the endless options of city amenities to be produced and creates the lines around the corner for every noodle/cupcake/cronut shop in town. In short, demand meets supply irrespective of the product or service. The basic fact that many city women demand manicures means that salons open to respond to this demand, and those very same salons are competing and thus adjust their price accordingly. The same holds true for organic heirloom tomatoes—which are not sold at just one grocer, as might be the case in a small town in Kansas. Instead, one only needs to walk a few blocks to find five different grocery stores catering to this desire. The sheer volume of suppliers and demand is what makes luxury so much cheaper in affluent cities—an all-around unfair reality of the twenty-first-century consumer city.

When urbanites do bemoan the cost of living in New York or Los Angeles, they are actually demonstrating their detachment from the reality of the rest of America. Five dollars is a lot for a coffee, yes, but no one in small-town West Virginia or Pennsylvania is even considering that purchase, let alone the $500 pair of shoes—neither of which are uncommon urbanite purchases. Handbury explains that it’s not so much that cities’ basic consumer items are more expensive (according to her, items like milk are less expensive in cities), but rather that people’s tastes become more expensive when they live in a city. And, as Rebecca Diamond finds, cities offer what she calls “hidden amenities”—access to (other) elites, lovely parks to stroll through, safe streets, diverse options for take-out—all of which improve well-being by 30% more than any standard-of-living index captures. The little prosaic things, not necessarily the designer shoes and expensive meals, make daily life more pleasant for the upwardly mobile and skilled.28 In big and small ways, cities are the critical consumption zones for the global elite.

SCENES OF CONSUMPTION

Rich urban denizens may generally like the same luxuries, but they of course like them with modifications. Standing in line at a Starbucks listening to the order for a skinny “half-caf” latte with extra foam, and two squirts of sugar-free caramel, brings these bizarre permutations of the urbanite into sharp relief. Even neighborhoods cultivate their own version of the luxury urban consumption experience—whether Venice and its penchant for washable cashmere shirts or Beverly Hills’s more standard Hermès approach to luxury. The same goes for Chicago’s bohemian Wicker Park versus Gold Coast neighborhoods. Boston’s moneyed Beacon Hill and intellectual Cambridge may be wildly different in taste, but both offer rich consumer options that distinctly cater to their respective inhabitants. University of Chicago sociologist Terry Clark believes these different amalgamations of consumption “scenes” comprise the “city as entertainment machine.” “Quality of life is not a mere byproduct of production,” Clark writes with fellow sociologist Richard Lloyd, “it defines and drives the new processes of production.”29 The city is where the intangible and vague notion of quality of life materializes in specific goods and services that respond to the different preferences of the urban dweller. Clark’s research tries to get at how these generalized dynamics of urban living play out in specific places. Rather than look at particular people, or particular locations, Clark looks at what people do and how they consume as a way to understand urban identities: glamour zones like Beverly Hills and Madison Avenue, with excessive conspicuous consumption and luxury goods; the Bohemian inclinations of Notting Hill, Soho, or Venice; or the more conventional behaviors of the middle class as found in the Upper West Side or Pasadena. But the same places can be different things to different people—Beverly Hills is at once home to a rich person, a place of semi-frequent conspicuous consumption to another, and a source of amusement and spectacle to yet another.³⁰

CITIES ARE THE SAME, CITIES ARE DIFFERENT

Consumption may define the urban experience generally, but Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite both being Californian cities, couldn’t be more different from one another, not just in the idiosyncrasies of their micro-scenes of glamour or grit, but also on a macro level. These cities are of course both great meccas of urbanity and all of its trappings—luxury coffee, great restaurants, museums, and big sports stadiums. But if you confused a San Franciscan with an Angelino, the former would be deeply insulted, priding himself on a bohemian intellectualism that the latter surely lacks. Angelinos find New Yorkers neurotic, New Yorkers find Chicagoans too Midwestern, and so forth. Herein lies a simple but important point about cities and their consumption: As New York is known for finance and fashion, San Francisco for technology, Detroit for automobiles, and Los Angeles for film and video games, the cities’ consumption options are equally important in underpinning their identities.

Cities, when examined through consumption patterns, are no more similar to each other than they are to the average small town. In fact, most small towns have more in common with each other than two randomly chosen metros. This may seem obvious at first blush, but most of the research on cities has attempted to understand a larger pattern of urbanity—the way in which we understand cities as a unified whole. In his famous 1938 essay, Urbanism as a Way of Life, University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth set out to define the city through three criteria: size, heterogeneity, and density.31 Many have followed suit: Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, argued that we are experiencing an “urban revolution” (indeed, 82% of the US population and more than half of the world are urban) and that the city needs to be studied as its own field, much like biology or physics. More recently, the Santa Fe Institute physicist, Geoffrey West, has constructed complicated equations and amassed big data to argue that regardless of size, density, or heterogeneity, deep, highly predictable structures uphold the city and urban patterns. West believes we can explain city functions and patterns through equations with 85% accuracy.³² For example, a city’s crime level, amount of waste, number of grocery stores, and so forth can be determined simply by knowing a city’s population size. Other work by Marta Gonzalez of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues, finds that humans exhibit a generalizable mobility pattern. Studying 100,000 people’s phone and text patterns from a six-million-person sample, Gonzalez and her colleagues find that a majority of people spend most of their time in four distinct locations. Even if most of us live and work in different locations, our spatial pattern is roughly predictable. In fact, the researchers went on to break out the individuals into three different groups to see if any differences might emerge, and found the behavior to be exactly the same. The groups were “largely indistinguishable” from one another.³³ The entire studied population tended to mainly make four stops to the same places and made those stops on a daily basis. So while the stops themselves were to different locations, the pattern of behavior is the same irrespective of where one lives, one’s race, occupation, or any other demographic or economic characteristics. They therefore conclude that it is possible to predict where people are at particular points in time with great accuracy and understand their movement, irrespective of where they are in a city or the city in which they reside.

As impressive as such approaches are in construction, execution, and findings, this new wave of research doesn’t tell us anything substantive about what it really means to be human, to live in a city, and what are the qualitative differences between those four different locations for one person versus another. For example, the four stops for a man who lives in Chicago might be leaving his four-bedroom house in the affluent Gold Coast in the morning to go for a run, stopping at a café for a coffee, heading to his finance job in downtown Chicago, and stopping at some organic café after work to pick up a dinner of wild salmon and organic broccoli. These four stops are meaningfully different from those of an hourly worker, single mom who might be battling the DC Beltway on her way to drop off one of her kids at daycare, and the other at elementary school, who then travels many more miles to a job that doesn’t pay the bills, to a harried after work pick-up of her kids, to a much less salubrious grocery store experience with limited fruit and vegetable options, before going to her perhaps much less safe, smaller apartment. Both days can be described in four stops, but the lives described are so incredibly different, and the data tell us nothing about these very different experiences of people living in the same city, let alone the millions of other people who also live in a city.

These data do not really describe the people who live there and what their lives are actually like. Generalizable patterns of city life are only superficial. Even Geoffrey West himself, after looking at all the models and data, remains puzzled by the ongoing mysteries of cities—why do we put up with them and what makes them so compelling (despite their high rent, cockroaches, and overzealous, cutthroat competition)?34

What’s clear is that cities as a whole are often understood only in broad strokes—those key criteria Wirth outlined some 75 years ago, to which we’ve made small additions in more recent research. Yes, cities are big and dense and diverse, just as villages are small, often racially homogeneous, and offer a more physically sprawling living experience of farmland or ample backyards. But what does that tell you about growing up in a small town in Missouri versus one in Mississippi? Yes, cities offer more amenities, but someone who likes a daily bike ride and the outdoor life isn’t going to necessarily appreciate the half cream, half coffee specialty of sidewalk vendors and the Barney’s Warehouse Sale as amenities; he may instead view these staples of the New York City identity as a nuisance. What makes urban life meaningful are the small components that ultimately define and vastly differentiate the city experience in San Francisco, Paris, Hong Kong, or Chicago.

THE SUM OF CITY LIFE

It’s hard to get at the small stuff, for sure. Some of it, the peculiarities of architecture, the history, the types of books people read and then discuss at dinner parties and book clubs, is almost impossible to articulate with any precision on a macro scale. But how we consume suggests particular values, preferences, and in turn what we might be talking about at those dinner parties in different cities. And that’s something we can track. When my doctoral student Hyojung Lee and I consulted the Consumer Expenditure Survey to see the thousands of things that Americans consume and parsed out the data by city, we found that part of our qualitative understanding of city difference can be understood through the lens of what the people in them consume.

Through the lens of detailed consumption patterns, cities appear to have very little in common with one another, other than those broad generalizations. This single observation explains why, whether Dodgers versus Giants fans or Chicago versus New York pizza, we see such antagonism between particular metropolises, and their respective urbanites, and why we can’t make sense of cities as a cohesive unit and must look at each of them individually. Rather, city dwellers are an amalgamation of people just as different from one another as they are from other countries or villages. When we look at consumption data, inhabitants of Los Angeles really do appear to have come from a different planet from those in Miami or Dallas. In the next section, I will break down these differences by how we eat, drink our coffee, drink alcohol, decorate our homes, and date, among other things that form the days of our urban lives.35

WHAT WE EAT

In some basic ways, we can see that some cities are healthier than others, and the data show that Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and San Francisco are home to the biggest fruit and vegetable consumers. Angelinos consistently spend 30–40% more of their total expenditures on fresh vegetables and between 10% and 40% more on fruit than any other city, except San Francisco.

Miami rivals Los Angeles in its fruit consumption. New Yorkers and San Franciscans aren’t quite as health-conscious, but they too spend significantly more on fruit and vegetables. On the one hand, some of these findings make sense. Miami and Los Angeles are located in two of the most agriculturally rich states in the country, and unsurprisingly, the produce tastes better, and as a result of abundance, is less expensive than in other cities. But there is also a cultural dynamic at play: These cities are home to people who care a lot about health and looking good. New York City has long been the capital of Tom Wolfe’s “social x-rays,” and the warm weather and beach scenes typical of Los Angeles and Miami put pressure on everyone to care at least a little bit about looking good without much clothing on.

Conversely, it should come as no surprise that Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore rank as the lowest consumers of fresh vegetables and fruit. One could make the geographical argument that they are simply farther away from fresh produce, but so is New York City. These are also cities known for steak, barbeque, beer, and comfort foods. Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwiches may not be a daily habit but they do reflect a culture that is more meat than kale. The cattle ranches in Texas offer an abundance of good beef. The culture of these cities and the best of their offerings propel consumer habits. However, for some cities the explanation is economic: Baltimore and Philadelphia are home to a greater share of low-income population. As has been long documented, grocery stores in poorer neighborhoods often do not provide fresh fruit and vegetable options, creating what sociologists and urban planners call “food deserts.” Low-income inhabitants often must rely on processed and high-fat foods to feed their families.

Candy, chewing gum, cola, and artificial sweeteners are popular in the Midwest but for the most part are avoided in coastal cities. Northeast cities consistently spend less than the national average by a significant amount. In 2010, for example, New Yorkers spent about half as much as most cities spend on artificial sweeteners and 55% less on candy and chewing gum. (The only exception is Boston, which spends about 60% more than the national average on artificial sweeteners and about 15% more on candy and chewing gum.) In general, city dwellers do not consume these items as compared to the rest of the country.

Non-metro areas consume a lot of artificial sweeteners, cola, fats, oils, and fresh milk and cream—exactly the items that city dwellers don’t buy. They also buy more frozen and canned vegetables and fruit rather than fresh. These are items that are, across the board, rarely bought in cities. This difference may simply be a matter of practicality; most people living in cities don’t have big freezers and pantries, and affluent city neighborhoods offer easy access to fresh produce. Those living outside of cities and their suburbs also dine out a lot less than city dwellers, who have access to the other foodstuffs (like butter and cream) in their restaurant and take-out consumption.

WHAT WE DRINK

We often think of coffee as a distinctly urban drink—frenzied neurotic city dwellers consuming it by the gallon. Yet, interestingly, other than a few cities, urban dwellers are not drinking or spending more on coffee than everyone else in the country. In fact, New York City, home to what we thought was the crazed, coffee-addicted urbanite, actually consumes less than the national average by about 30%. The real urban coffee drinkers are not Seattle or San Francisco either—but Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, where share of total expenditure on coffee is up to 20% higher than the national average expenditure share. Where Seattle spends the most is in roasted coffee—which is of course part of the city’s culture and export market. Insofar as there is a trend in caffeine consumption, city inhabitants generally consume more tea than the rest of the country, particularly in the Northeast in New York City and Philadelphia. Could this be a vestige from the days of Edith Wharton? Possibly, although true to New York’s reputation as a pioneer of cultural trends, equally it could be the next best thing and the one that other places haven’t caught on to yet. When it comes to bottled water, Los Angeles inhabitants spend up to 75% more than the rest of the country. This appears to be one of the defining consumption products of the city, as no other city even comes close to its numbers.

As a whole, urban dwellers have something in common when it comes to nonalcoholic beer, dining out, and drinking wine. They consume none of the country’s nonalcoholic beer (and I mean none of it) and universally spend more money on dining out and drinking wine—social activities that go hand in hand. San Francisco, San Diego, New York, and Boston have been known to spend more than twice as much on wine, in total expenditure, than the national average. And for those cities that are less likely to drink wine—Philadelphia and Detroit—they make up for it in beer and cocktails. Generally, beer is less of an urban drink than wine or cocktails, although Boston and Minneapolis are overachievers in all areas of alcoholic consumption. Only Miami is a teetotaler across the board, spending about 40% less than the rest of the country on alcoholic beverages.

HOME IS WHERE THE MONEY IS

Cities may offer cheaper goods, but when it comes to homeownership and running a household, urbanites spend significantly more for the privilege of location. Parks, an abundance of museums, coffee shops on every corner, and ample shopping—all of those “hidden amenities” and consumption options—are factored into the cost of homeownership and rent in cities. Across most major cities, inhabitants devote significantly more of their share of expenditures to housing than the national average. By share of expenditure, I mean that, of a household’s outgoing costs, the greatest percentage (or share) is devoted to housing. By this measure, New York City spends the most—about 50% more than the national average share of expenditure—this includes renters and owners (an important distinction I will explain below). The most expensive housing market overall, in terms of average annual spending, is in San Francisco. Severely hit by economic hardship, Detroit and Cleveland have lower housing expenses than the national average. The housing markets in these cities have not rebounded, which may account for cheaper housing and an overall depressed urban economy (less employment means fewer people can afford to buy houses which further drives down demand which impacts housing prices)—both of which detract from these cities’ desirability and competitiveness in the housing market. But housing can also be cheaper when there is a lot of available space on which to build. Houston and Dallas, with their more relaxed zoning and love of sprawl, are home to those who devote significantly less of their overall expenditures on owning a home than the national average (that’s including less expensive rural areas). In short, owning or renting a home in a depressed housing market or in one where there is more land and thus more housing means that housing prices are cheaper and generally mortgages are a smaller part of a household’s overall expenditures.

Despite the multi-million-dollar price tag of houses in their cities, what may give San Franciscans and New Yorkers pause is that they spend a remarkably small amount and share of their total expenditures on homeownership (as opposed to renting, which shows very different trends that I will discuss shortly). For San Francisco, arguably the hottest real estate market in the country, housing expenditure shares on owning a home are only 20% more than the national average. In 2012, San Franciscans spent less than the national average in their share of expenditures devoted to owning a home (11.8% of total expenditures nationally versus 11.5% for San Franciscans). New Yorkers (as in those who live in one of the five boroughs) consistently spend 20–25% less than the national average on homeownership and in 2009 spent a third less than everyone else. These last two numbers may surprise both those living in these cities and anyone aware of the high cost of housing associated with them as well. But remember, the calculation is share of total expenditures—not absolute dollars. Homeowners in San Francisco or New York are those who earn much more sizable incomes and can more comfortably afford the high prices. So even if New York or San Francisco houses or apartments sell in the millions, those who can afford them are already making so much more than everyone that, as a share of total outgoing costs, housing takes up less of a proportion than it would with a less wealthy group of home buyers (in Orlando, Florida or Atlanta, Georgia, for example). Also, homeownership in New York is less common than renting, which may bring the overall average down. When you consider absolute dollars devoted to homeownership, New Yorkers still spend less than everyone else, in terms of average annual expenditures on owned dwellings, while San Francisco’s housing market is one of the most expensive in the country, behind Washington, DC (in 2007 average absolute spending in San Francisco was more than two times that of New York City). Yet here, too, as a share of expenditures, housing does not dominate, confirming that people in San Francisco generally have sufficiently high incomes that, for those who buy rather than rent homes, homeownership does not dominate their spending.

The way to understand the impact of these cities’ housing costs on the average city dweller is to examine expenditures on housing for those who rent, where New York City, San Francisco, and Miami households devote huge amounts of their spending. No matter how comfortable a local housing market is, for most people, a mortgage is often a huge chunk of total expenditures. Even for a home in a reasonably priced housing market, thousands of dollars may be devoted to a mortgage every month. Rent, however, fluctuates wildly from $550 a month for a luxury one bedroom, 600-square-foot apartment in Cleveland to more than $2,500 for the same space in Manhattan. Because more urban dwellers rent than own, rent is a good measure of what’s really going on for the majority of people living in cities. As both a share of expenditures and in absolute dollars, the rent in major cities is very expensive. New Yorkers spend 300% of the national average on rent (an average of more than $8,000 per year, which is almost four times more than Minneapolis, twice as much as DC, and more than twice as much as Chicago, Boston, Seattle, or Phoenix). According to StreetEasy, the average rent in New York City was predicted to be $2,700 in 2015—that’s almost 60% of median income in the city (the rule of thumb is that a household should be spending 30% or less of before-tax income on housing). Between 2000 and 2013, New York City rental prices grew almost two times the pace of income, with this trend impacting low-income neighborhoods the most.36

The second most expensive rental market is San Francisco, where the average household spends anywhere from 50% to 80% more than the national average (but double the rent for smaller, less expensive cities like Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, or Philadelphia). As a share of their total outgoings, Los Angeles and San Diego households spend more than twice the national average on rent expenditures. There are a few ways to look at these numbers. First, these are some of the most desirable places to live, but many people cannot afford to buy a home so the rental market is very heated and rentals are in short supply. Second, in some cities those who rent rather than buy have less total income and thus a greater share of their income and expenditures is devoted to housing as well as food and clothes. Finally, some of these cities—New York, San Francisco, and DC, for example—are experiencing an influx of uber-luxury apartment complexes that are really an option only for the superrich. This type of building is essentially creating a “two-tier” rental market between the superrich and everyone else.³⁷ As those luxury apartments absorb the housing demand of the superrich, and as people who would have been owners stay in the rental market, the share on housing may seem lower than expected in New York and San Francisco (which may explain why San Francisco’s share of expenditures on rent is lower than that of San Diego—the former city simply has many more richer tenants who pull down the average share of income devoted to rent). Other cities around the country are experiencing almost the inverse trend: In Minneapolis, Chicago, and Baltimore, people spend slightly more than the national average in share of expenditures devoted to homeownership, but they spend significantly less on rent.

Another unique aspect of the urban housing market is the vacation home—something most Americans never consider as a purchase. The vacation home is a hallmark of urban spending—again reflecting the general affluence of those living in cities compared to those living elsewhere. New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago take the lead here: On average, New Yorkers spend 242% of the national average on vacation homes, Philadelphians spend 175%, San Franciscans 164%, and Chicagoans spend 152%. In 2008, New Yorkers spent up to 436% of the national average in share of expenditures on vacation homes. (Incidentally, after the Great Recession, New Yorkers reined in spending on vacation homes. In 2012, they spent “just” 213% of the national average, while Washington, DC and Boston both increased their vacation home expenditures to 205% of the national average. Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago all significantly reduced their spending on vacation homes, spending just 14–41% more than the average American household.) You might think that New Yorkers buy expensive vacation homes given that they devote greater percentages of their expenditures to vacation homes than anywhere else in the country (from 2007 to 2012 they spent on average 1.3% of total expenditures on vacation homes compared to the national average of 0.6%), and that might be true—vacation homes in the Hamptons cost many millions of dollars. But it’s also the case that New Yorkers appear to spend so much more than everyone else because just a very slim margin of the population purchases a vacation home, which is in itself a luxury consumer choice far removed from the normalcy of milk and eggs and owning one home.

NANNIES, HOUSEKEEPERS, AND THE PRICE OF TIME

Similarly, child care in the form of nannies over daycare is an urban luxury and reality especially in Washington, DC, and the Connecticut and New Jersey suburbs.38 Without question, nannies cost more in cities, but people in cities tend to work more, too, and those labor market elites tend to have the money to afford nannies versus daycare. Again, in the case of New York, there is a self-selection bias: Those who can afford nannies tend to make enough money that the expenditure makes only a tiny dent in overall expenditures.

Housekeeping services are also a remarkably urban phenomenon, with New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco spending almost double the rest of the country (whereas housekeeping supplies is a disproportionately non-metro purchase). Most city households spend more than the national average, reflecting both the abundance of such services in cities (making it easy to find a regular housekeeper) but also the need for outsourcing because of the work schedules of urban workers. Much like nannies and daycare, housekeeping buys back time, allowing people to work the hours they need to be productive in high-pressure careers, but also to use their free time for activities other than washing the dishes and vacuuming.

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONES’S IN DIFFERENT WAYS

When I was a graduate student in New York City, I lived in a 400-square-foot studio, I slept on a twin bed, ate a breakfast of a muffin and a coffee on the go while walking to the library, and I wrote my dissertation and first book at a small Target-purchased imitation wood desk squashed next to a bookcase crammed with Marx, microeconomics textbooks, and most of my literary fiction collection, stacked high with journal articles atop those books. The desk was a mere two feet from my bed. I remember near the end of my time in graduate school, my best friend walked into my Upper West Side studio one winter day, looked around, and said, “You’d better finish up that doctorate soon because your apartment looks like that of a serial killer.” I graduated that May.

Inside those stuffed closets (I had two that were so small it was hard to even fit a winter coat) and under that small bed, I had literally mountains of expensive clothing I had no business owning. The clothes, heaped on my coffee table or stuffed into one of those tiny closets, were the entire collections of Intermix and Barney’s Co-op, and yet most nights I subsisted on cold Chinese takeout or pizza, eaten standing up over the kitchen sink before I headed out for an evening of fun adventures with my friends.

What was paradoxical was that I could have used at least some money on reasonable furniture from Ikea, or perhaps spent a little less time shopping and going out with my friends and more on tidying up my apartment, but the incentives weren’t there—no one came over anyway. No one really hosted dinner parties or had people over for coffee. People did everything outside of their home in the cafés and bars located on all corners of the city. Working on my first book, I remember interviewing Ingrid Sichy, editor of Interview magazine at the time, and she said the same thing, unprompted by me—that the city was one’s dining room, living room, and extended home—rather than the apartment, which is just where we went to sleep at night. Sichy, friend of Andy Warhol, glamorous cultural icon on the New York City scene, was, just like the rest of us, merely paying rent to actually live and be entertained in the city at large.

Thus it is no surprise at all to see that many urban households seem to have similar priorities. Across all cities, urbanites reveal remarkably less expenditure share than the national average on household textiles, bathroom and bedroom linens, furniture, and silver serving pieces—all the trappings of the tidy, beautifully maintained home. As a whole, their expenditure share on televisions is lower than the national average and non-metro areas. New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, DC, and Atlanta spend the least of all cities on TVs. Sure, there are some exceptions—New York City likes its decorative pillows. Houston and Dallas like textiles and furniture, and Chicagoans consistently spend just above average on TVs—but the trend is clear. Urban folks spend their money on things outside of the material goods of the home. They may outsource labor to make their home lives easier, but they are not spending money on the material aspects of their homes. This decision is in part because they eat and entertain outside the home. It may also be due to the transient nature of many people’s urban experience—people live in cities for some parts of their lives, then they get married, have kids, and move to the suburbs, which is when they start to care about sofas and bathroom towels.

Yet, another important aspect of this pattern is that urbanites spend so much time outside of their homes that their materialism is devoted to their own external physical appearance, rather than that of their internal world, thus encapsulating Georg Simmel’s early-twentieth-century observation of eccentric urbanites who use clothing as a quick signal of identity and individuality.39 When we look at both men’s and women’s apparel and footwear we find exactly this trend: People in cities spend more on shoes and clothes. Certain cities are acutely emblematic of this trend. As a share of their outgoing expenditures, New York City women spend two times more on shoes than everyone else. As far as women’s clothes go, Dallas and New York City are home to the biggest spenders, unsurprising given the ostentatious need-to-be-seen nature of both cities’ cultures. New York City and Washington, DC are home to the biggest spenders on men’s shoes—likely a result of being the epicenters of two male-dominated industries: finance and politics. While most cities spend an average amount on watches, New York City and Los Angeles spend more by a large margin. In fact, in 2010, New Yorkers spent about 27 times more on watches as a share of total expenditures than everyone else—no city even compares. In absolute dollars, New Yorkers spent more than $1,300 on average on a watch in 2010, while Los Angeles is significantly more modest at $105. While watches can cost many tens of thousands, and $105 isn’t so unreasonable, remember the number is an average, so plenty of households are reporting spending nothing at all and still New Yorkers spent in excess of a thousand dollars on watches per household. Even though LA is ranked second in terms of share devoted to watch-buying, it’s but a tenth of New York’s spending.

Watches may price out most people, even city folks, but those inexpensive manicures (and massages and facials) are a lure for urbanites across the board. New Yorkers, Miamians, and the DC set are the biggest spenders on personal care services, but pretty much everyone except the crunchy bohemians of Seattle are a part of the trend. Yet, for all the money spent on massages, trainers, exercise classes, and haircuts, urbanites actually spend very little of their total expenditures on beauty products like hairspray, makeup, and other accoutrements (Boston least of all). One explanation could simply be that they are spending so much energy and money on their ongoing self-care—exercise, skincare, and hair—that products like mascara are less necessary. City dwellers have sculpted themselves to some version of a natural perfect. Keep in mind, however, that exercise classes and nice haircuts cost significantly more than any tube of mascara. Another explanation for the differences in beauty and personal grooming care in cities versus non-urban areas comes down to options. Many of the self-care services are simply not on offer outside of major cities. If massages, Pilates, or meditation classes can be found in a small town, there are unlikely to be many competitors, so these services are far more expensive (remember the economies of scale for luxury urban goods). While the non-metro household is unlikely to be spending much money on Pilates instructors or weekly manicures, one can barely walk down a city block without passing an exercise studio or nail salon. Thus, relative to the urbanite, non-metro households spend much less on services but more on products, which are far more democratic and withinin their reach. Most anyone can get a tube of good mascara, but it’s pretty hard to find a regular yoga or Zumba class outside of a major city. Finally, it could simply be the aesthetic culture of cities: As ostentatious as they are in some respects, there is a subtlety to many city dwellers’ beauty habits. Makeup rarely looks obvious, manicures are often clear or a pale pink. The exceptions to this trend are Houston and Dallas (and Seattle, of all places), where there is more of an inclination to spend on beauty products, including wigs and hairpieces.

THE HIDDEN AND NOT-SO-HIDDEN AMENITIES OF CITIES

Irrespective of these intercity differences, there are distinct qualities of urbanity that connect cities to one another. Earlier in this chapter I discussed how cities offer experiences that are not entirely material and yet often explain the compelling nature of city living and why so many people are willing to put up with the general mayhem of city life. As previously noted, Rebecca Diamond calls these things hidden amenities.40 Edward Glaeser sees social interaction and density as a means for city dwellers to be more productive in their work lives and maximize their potential in the marriage market.⁴¹ Personally and professionally, people thrive when they are close together and have access to many options and resources, in much the same way that biotech research scientists or artists are most creative in concentration and socialization with others like them. Most of us enjoy being around others—we make more friends, we attain more knowledge about current trends, we meet our future spouses, and so forth. And of course a greater concentration of people provides more opportunities for these interactions to occur. We can quantify the importance of such urban social capital by studying the ways in which people spend money to attain social capital. When we want to make friends, country clubs and social clubs are a swift way to become part of a particular group of people. When we want to influence those in power, political contributions are the most direct route, and when we want to meet a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife, dating services provide us access to many other single people. All of these options are essentially monetized mechanisms for interacting with other people, and they provide an effective and efficient system in an otherwise complicated social scene. All of these things cost money, and in this realm, city dwellers spend significantly less than their suburban counterparts.

The same is true for dating services, where cities spend significantly less shares of their total expenditures than the national average. Boston, Cleveland, San Diego, and the Connecticut and New Jersey suburbs take the prize for the least interest. Perhaps those who live there feel that the city offers them all they need in their romantic life—or they’re not dating at all. (Recent data indicate that in many cities, 40% to almost 50% of residents are single.)42 More generally, whether for platonic or romantic reasons, free versions of social networks like Meet-Up, OK Cupid, and their ilk work so efficiently in big cities that costly services are less imperative. The only two exceptions to this trend are New York City and Detroit, where inhabitants spend up to 150% above the national average on dating services. While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who is spending on finding their soul mate, one might suspect that in New York City, wealthy New Yorkers might seek out their ideal mate through high-end services like Kelleher International. These types of matchmaking services (which are more old-fashioned than online dating) require entrance fees of $15,000. Some soul mate searchers will pay $150,000 to launch an international search.⁴³ Detroit is a bit more challenging to understand: In 2010, Detroit spent about nine times the national average on dating, which is nine times the national average spending share. Detroit’s affection for Match.com and its online brethren might be explained as a result of the overall decline in population and hemorrhaging of the urban economy. Many of the “free” social benefits of living in a dense city may have eroded.

While most urbanites don’t invest in dating, they do spend a lot of time on free dating services like Grindr and Tinder, which are social media apps that allow users to essentially have a geographical sense of where other potential mates are located. In a somewhat disconcerting case in point, I was eating in a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena with my friend Eric (an avid Grindr user, if only in the passive, trolling sense). While I was eating tacos, he was doing a Grindr search; it turned out that a potential mate was at a table a mere 10 feet away, as indicated by the location button on his app flashing incessantly. Since the Grindr app has to be open for a location to be traced, this guy also would also had to have his app open and would thus be aware of Eric’s whereabouts, making for a rather awkward situation when neither of them made an effort to speak (or would it have been worse the other way round?). Apps like Grindr and Tinder work very well in dense urban environments because their effectiveness (and array of options) relies on proximity to others to make flash decisions about meeting up, efficiently illustrating the hidden amenities of living in cities.

In 1956, in his book The Power Elite, the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about an echelon of society he called the “Metropolitan 400,” an elite set of individuals born from historically prestigious families.44 Individuals in this group, whom Mills believed were intertwined with political, military, and corporate elite, were part of a larger conspiracy (whether conscious or not) to firmly solidify their positions as the major decision makers in all aspects of society, further separating them from what can only be called the “have-nots,” thus having detrimental consequences for those not a part of this group. While Mills spends a great deal of time discussing the elites in all parts of society, the Metropolitan 400 were defined by their city address and by their membership to the Social Register, a list of local elites in particular major cities around the United States. The Metropolitan 400 was a Mills construct with acute descriptions of Brooks Brothers suits, Ivy League pedigree, and memberships to social clubs. So perturbed by the rise of democratic wealth, Mills argued, American aristocracy or “old money” looked for ways to distinguish themselves from the simply rich, and one such way was through the Social Register and its accompanying social practices and memberships.

Some 60 years later, the Social Register still exists, and the use of social clubs to create in-crowds (primarily defined by their economic status) is alive and well. Boston, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and the affluent New York suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey spend a good 40% or more than the national average on social clubs. But there are also changes in the landscape. Some cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, and, surprisingly, New York are completely disengaged from this elitist practice. Part of this difference can be explained by what social clubs are actually about: the formalization (and monetization) of being a part of a particular group, exactly what Mills found problematic. Whether WASP high society of Boston, the elite financers of Connecticut, or the political inner circles of Washington, making friends still remains hard, but in such circles writing checks to enter elite groups lubricates the process. While all cities possess elites, some younger cities don’t have a lineage of old-money high society and are more egalitarian in general—Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta, for example, all of which spend less or just on average with the rest of the country on social memberships.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION IN CITIES

Mills, like his contemporary John Kenneth Galbraith, and Thorstein Veblen before, was concerned about the social ramifications of concentrated wealth and its various signals. The pernicious and less obvious examples are those of secret social clubs, particular accents revealing where one studied or grew up, and the subtle cues of prestige. These types of behaviors and practices were particularly exclusive because obvious signs of status were becoming so commonplace—lots of people were beginning to spend on conspicuous consumption. If everyone could afford to look rich by donning Ralph Lauren, or buying automobiles (even luxury ones), the classic material signals of wealth were less a demarcation between the rich and the rest. No one cared who had a nice car or wore golf shirts—these signals of affluence evolved into signals of the egalitarian American Dream. Real elitism was far more subtle and relied on symbolic capital and social cues that were acquired in more exclusive milieus, whether the beach houses of Cape Cod or the Hamptons, the Ivy League or social clubs.

This phenomenon is never so obvious as it is in metropolitan America. In studying the status goods that are a part of conspicuous consumption—watches, jewelry, shoes, clothes, and so forth, what one might call “socially visible goods”—it’s apparent that people in cities spend much more on conspicuous consumption than anyone else—even controlling for age, income level, education, race, occupation, and marital status.45 Particular cities—New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—influence their inhabitants’ spending more than others. What I mean is that, just by virtue of living in one of these cities, you will spend on conspicuous consumption more than if you lived elsewhere. The city itself becomes an influence on how one spends. For example, New Yorkers—regardless of how old they are, how much they earn, or whether they are black or white, married or single—spend 50% more on conspicuous consumption goods than those living outside of cities and 40% more than the nation as a whole. The other three aforementioned cities influence status spending by just under 20% more than those living outside of a city. You might think that such spending is a function of living in expensive locations, but a look at these cities’ overall expenditures reveals that they spend essentially what the rest of the country does on other, more normal, less conspicuous consumption items.

Why do we see such patterns? Here we come full circle to those early urban sociologists like Louis Wirth and Georg Simmel. It is precisely the density, heterogeneity, and high visibility of city life that make status goods more worthwhile to purchase (everyone sees them, after all). When we see other people wearing nice jewelry, great shoes, or designer handbags on the subway, at the museum, on the sidewalk, there is a peer effect driving us to do the same. But equally, we purchase ostentatious and conspicuous goods as a way to show our differences. Christian Louboutin’s five-inch heels are a sign of being a part of an elite fashion set while also screaming “look at me” with their bright red soles. The shoes become both a tool for fitting in and standing out, much as a Rolex, a Chanel handbag, or Porsche does as well. As the great German sociologist Georg Simmel remarked some 90 years ago in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” when people move to cities, they become more eccentric, more visually individualistic, as a way to distinguish themselves from the throngs of others living there.46 Such individuality and distinction must occur instantaneously as we walk past each other on the street, thus clothing becomes one of the most efficient ways to do so.

Much of conspicuous consumption rests on our relationship to our neighbors and peers and thus city life plays a significant role in how we consume. In a 2006 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Dartmouth professor Erzo Luttmer found that our neighbors’ wealth inversely affected our well-being. In fact, while living next to rich people makes us unhappy, it’s worse to be friends with them.⁴⁷ Thus, in New York City, where making $500,000 is “middle class,”⁴⁸ it’s no surprise that its inhabitants feel the pressure to keep up with their friends who make $5 million a year, or to at least appear as though they are on par. In New York City, just like San Francisco, everyone feels poor (even the well-to-do) because the density of the city forces close and frequent contact with others, including those with great wealth. This density puts further pressure on inhabitants to be status-conscious, and reminds them of their social and economic position vis-à-vis everyone else. In general, cities have this effect on us—we are both pressured and rewarded by conspicuous, status-oriented consumption.

One area of conspicuous consumption where urbanites feel a lesser need to impress is car purchases. Other than Detroit, Minneapolis, and Seattle, urban dwellers spend less than the national average on cars as a result of good public transportation and walkability in cities (even in Los Angeles), and the use of sidewalks and subways further propels us to interact with the rest of the city. But the lack of cars as status symbol is the corollary to the increased pressure to acquire those other socially visible goods like shoes and watches.

The raison d’être of cities is that they are centers of human civilization, whether production, as they were during the Industrial Revolution, or the consumption of apparel, restaurants museums, and nightlife, as they are now. They have always been great centers of people, and with that come the signals and their trappings that allow us to both distinguish and assimilate ourselves with others. That those in cities spend more on conspicuous consumption is a result of what it is like to live in a city—a dense, frenzied place where we are both trying to fit in and strike out on our own at the same time. But it is the localized interpretation of status and consumption and the appropriation and re-appropriation of meaning that is imbued upon particular objects, some of which I have parsed out and attempted to quantify, that is most fascinating.

In his book Distinction, the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, wrote about the means by which status was attained across different classes. Bourdieu argued that the working class didn’t simply want what the rich already had, but rather each class’s values reflected their respective social position. In essence, they wanted different things altogether. The working class prized new over vintage or antique, American football rather than tennis, ostentatious weddings rather than small, quiet affairs.49 To use Max Weber’s term, the rich, middle class, and working class embody and prioritize different “styles of life.”50 Consumer behavior becomes one of the key elements in demonstrating status, and thus different cities, with their diverse populations in terms of race, income, industry, and educational levels, have dramatically different consumption patterns. Their social lives, and the environment in which they form tastes, or what Bourdieu called “habitus,” is reflected in their distinct consumption patterns.⁵¹ The everyday patterns of life play into these choices.

Empirically, we can see the extent to which the unique characteristics of a city might influence consumer behavior and thus why different cities express different levels of conspicuous consumption. With my colleague Gary Painter and student Hyojung Lee, we quantified and measured how cities shape consumption habits. Holding everything else equal (for example, age, income level, education, and race), particular urban characteristics influence how inhabitants spend on status goods. As would be expected, the denser the city (as defined by number of thousand persons per square mile), the more conspicuous consumption. When there are more people around, there is greater pressure to reveal status and also a greater social bump from conspicuous consumption. Because young people likely have fewer obligations in other areas of their lives and enjoy a highly social lifestyle, the younger the population, the greater the level of conspicuous consumption. Given that they provide more opportunities for their clientele to flaunt their status, greater numbers of drinking establishments and restaurants are also associated with conspicuous consumption.⁵²

Conversely, more expensive rental markets (and thus less discretionary income) are associated with less conspicuous consumption, as are rainy days, given the greater likelihood that bad weather encourages us to stay at home. Counterintuitively, cities with a higher population of the top 1% also spend less on conspicuous consumption. While this latter result may seem contradictory, consider that if there are a lot of people with a lot of money, many more people can conspicuously consume and so such goods are less powerful in conveying status among a group of people who are already elite. Like the great sociologists of the early twentieth century and Veblen himself, we find that people engage in status-suggestive behavior when they are in social environments and around many other people where there is a premium and incentive to stake out one’s position. Consider the spread between cities’ conspicuous consumption versus “nonconspicuous” spending (which we define as total expenditures minus conspicuous consumption): We find that the difference in conspicuous consumption spending between the highest spending city (Detroit) and the least spending city (Boston) is a whopping 32%. For nonconspicuous spending, the spread between San Diego and Detroit narrows to just 4.4%. This stark discrepancy suggests that nonconspicuous consumption is not socially or geographically specific; rather, consumers exhibit a generalizable pattern in buying basic goods and services. Conspicuous consumption, on the other hand, appears highly dependent on particular variables and particular places. Overall, conspicuous consumption is a distinctly “urban feature.”53

When I think about city differences, I am often reminded of a more contemporary, albeit quirky, example—that of the surfer menorah. As its namesake would suggest, this item is a menorah fashioned with a surfboard placed on the stem between the candelabrum’s branches and its foot. New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch wrote in great detail about its popularity on the beaches of Laguna Niguel in Southern California and the impossibility of selling it anywhere else. It is the hybrid culture specific to Southern California that allows such an item to be ironic (even literal for some) rather than offensive. But such an item only exists as a result of the great beaches that enable surfing and the rise of auto design, which brought lots of new acrylics and materials that allowed surfboards to advance along with a liberal Jewish population. Along with surfboards came the “high-jinks” surfer culture that inspired the irreverent art scene of the 1960s which influenced the production of that surfer menorah many decades later. The surfing wouldn’t be possible without the beach and the ocean, but those surfboards were a result of materials spawned from aerospace and cars. So the surfer menorah becomes place-specific due to the confluence of artistic materials, culture, and demographics that are found only in the peculiarities of Southern California.⁵⁴ More generally, little things influence how people in particular cities live their day-to-day lives. Those little things become the big differences that make Boston and San Francisco and everything in between such distinctive places to live and define oneself, much of which we accomplish through what we consume.

But different cities (and their cultures) also find different means to a similar end. By way of anecdote, after moving from New York to California, I found that within five or six years I wore less black, ate more vegetables, learned how to cook quinoa (even though I still find its appeal mystifying)—all of which were antithetical to my New York City modus vivendi and identity. Perhaps these differences can be explained by the cold weather of New York, the city’s position as the fashion industry capital, and thus the penchant to wear black. Juxtapose this milieu to the good life, good weather, and sense of well-being for which Los Angeles has always prided itself. Los Angeles’ history of television emphasizes women appealing to mainstream America rather than the avant-garde aesthetic of runway fashion. But in both examples, I (like many women before and after me) was responding to a prevailing female aesthetic. There are countless examples. Our consumption patterns often reflect the dominant culture in which we are immersed: New York fashion and the social x-rays of high society, Los Angeles’ television and film stars, Portland’s bohemian intellectuals, or San Francisco’s anti-fashion tech entrepreneurs (or what New York Times fashion writer Guy Trebay dubbed, “the land that style forgot”).55 Most of us are none of the above, but when we live somewhere we tend to reflect it somewhat in how we look and what we consume to look that way. Through the accretion of history, geography, industry, and even weather, cities offer particular and idiosyncratic options that build upon and influence one another—an overabundance of yoga pants in Los Angeles, pink chinos in Boston, backyard vegetable gardens in Portland, coral nail polish in Orlando, or the active unfashionable San Francisco style. As Molly Young writes in New York Magazine, “If culture is partly a result of who is attracted to a given locale, it makes sense that those enticed by San Francisco’s temperate climate would likewise gravitate toward soft, moisture-wicking zip-ups.”⁵⁶

Yet despite these little differences, cities are fundamentally connected to one another through their positions as nodes of consumption and inhabitation for the twenty-first-century elite. Twenty-first-century cities may not possess the Metropolitan 400, but through skyrocketing rent, expensive preparatory schools, and exorbitant cost of living, they exist as figurative and literal citadels of elite living. The Metropolitan 400 of C. Wright Mills’s time was exclusive but limited to a small cast of characters who were economically and socially rare even to other urban denizens. Today’s cities house a far bigger elite and one that reinforces their position not simply through high society but through the trappings of their day-to-day lives. Living among other elites allows them to ignore the vast inequality between their urban utopia and even their nearby suburbs, let alone the rest of the world. As Ross Douthat remarked:

[Global elites] have their own distinctive worldview … their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) and of course, their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) … like any other tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable so wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home … they can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like aristocracy to the excluded.57

Covered by an invisible tissue of urbanity, cities are able to offer many versions of themselves to those who self-select into one metropolis versus another and consume accordingly.⁵⁸ We respond to these options and in the process they shape us. But as we are shaped by our cities, we simultaneously shape them, and the world at large, too. That cities are becoming centers of what Douthat has termed “elite tribalism” means that, despite their many options and seeming diversity, they too are reinforcing inequality and the class divisions of the twenty-first century.