5

Home, Home on the Scene

How Scenes Shape Residential Patterns

As you enter the Chicago Bronzeville neighborhood on the grand boulevard of Martin Luther King Drive, you are welcomed by the bigger-than-life statue of Soulman. Soulman is a young black man with his head high, sporting a large-brimmed hat and a suitcase tied closed with rope. His entire body seems covered with fish scales, but look more closely and they are the soles of shoes. They remind us of the many shoes worn out walking the Underground Railroad from the Deep South to Bronzeville. Soulman was a brave pioneer who escaped his slave master for the promise of freedom. The number of Soulmen courageous enough to risk the Underground Railroad was tiny, but they inspired thousands who followed in later years.

Figure 5.1

Soulman in Bronzeville, Chicago

The symbolic heritage of Soulman remains strong in contemporary Bronzeville. Its thousands of new mixed-income housing units are surrounded by numerous churches, large and small, and strong memories of blues and gospel, which were pioneered here. Richard Wright read his works at the Wabash YMCA. He is one of dozens commemorated in the bronze plaques lining the sidewalks of King Drive. These scenes that grew up around Bronzeville’s historic legacy played a role at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Mary Pattillo (2008) documents in Black on the Block, in attracting many new middle-income residents who could have chosen to live elsewhere. They found a rich symbolic repository of historically potent images and aspirations, where song, sermon, solo, dance, verse, and more provide venues for critical judgment of, respite from, and creative engagement with an often harsh and hostile world.

Bronzeville of course embodies just one type of scene. The ghosts of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac still haunt Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, and scenes that evoke Bohemian and Beat themes of self-expression and transgression are significant draws for young people and artists to this day. Similarly, pastoral images of the countryside, with its slow rhythms and quiet communities, often speak to older persons. Many spend their golden years of retirement “on the road,” in RVs rolling through America’s great scenes of natural beauty. Other retirees, particularly “ruppies” (retired urban professionals), may be drawn to emerging downtown scenes, with amenities like restaurants, operas, symphony halls, and parks.

Different people are drawn to different scenes. The character of the scene plays a major role in determining who lives where and therefore what shape residential communities take. To be sure, more than amenities define the opportunities and attractions that places afford to current and potential residents. Hence it is crucial to analyze multiple variables and multiple units of analysis.

Simple as this idea is, the major traditions of urban analysis have tended to propose one-factor, one-level explanations, with jobs typically taking center stage. There is a certain plausibility to this approach. Counties (or metros) generally constitute single labor markets. If finding a job is the major motivation for moving, then any neighborhood within a given labor market is, all things considered, as good as any other—jobs anywhere in the city draw people from many neighborhoods and backgrounds, according to this tradition. Hence many quantitative studies typically report large area data on economic and population change for entire counties or metro areas. Ethnographers by contrast often conduct case studies of individual neighborhoods, which generally ignore national or global patterns. And national surveys of individuals largely omit their neighborhoods.

However, if we admit that choosing a place to live involves a more wide-ranging and complex set of considerations, the analytical picture changes. In particular, residents of different neighborhoods have ready access to widely varying amenities and scenes, even within the same city. Chicago is a case in point. Just north of Bronzeville is the four-mile area around the Loop, which attracted in the 1990s more 25- to 34-year-olds and college graduates, relative to the metro area, than any other downtown in the entire United States.1 Many attribute the popularity to the four months of free or inexpensive concerts and related Loop restaurants and nightlife. Rents escalated as these young urban professionals moved in. Yet in other Chicago neighborhoods, population and rent were stable, while still others have been seriously declining, such as those near abandoned steel factories. Data for the whole county sums these many neighborhood-specific dynamics, which are lost when aggregated.

Chicago is similar to most big cities in illustrating such neighborhood-specific diversity. To capture such diversity analytically requires a more wide-ranging approach. We need to compare local communities to one another, both within and across the cities in which they are situated. And we need to incorporate jobs and income measures along with newer dimensions like glamour and self-expression and newer amenities (at least in America) like yoga and martial arts clubs. The point in doing so is not to disagree with past results so much as to show how they can be enhanced by adding scenes concepts and measures to the story. What emerges is a novel picture of why people live where they do and how residential patterns are changing.

Chapter overview. A few main types of questions guide the following analyses. A first question asks which types of scenes attract which types of people. We find links between scenes and population changes across many subgroups: young people tend to increase in transgressive scenes, baby boomers are rising where self-expression and local authenticity mix, and retirees are increasing both near natural amenities and in places rich in the arts. Moreover, Bronzeville is not alone in having a scene linked with African Americans: historically concentrated in more communitarian scenes, African Americans have been shifting somewhat away from such scenes and toward those that mix glamour and exhibitionism. Scenes matter not only to the young, educated, and the affluent, but also to middle-aged, older, and nonwhite persons.

We also ask how scenes distinguish within and transcend powerful social cleavages, like race, religion, and education. Contra the idea that artists constitute a distinct new class or homogeneous consumption group, we find that arts jobs are found in several different scenes. Similarly, we question the extent to which America is “coming apart” along a great cultural divide. There are to be sure major cultural differences across neighborhoods: the proportion of college-educated whites is relatively large in zip codes with yoga studios but small in those with evangelical churches; vice versa for nonwhites. However, some amenities bridge these differences. Popular culture (e.g., fast food, pop music, and sports) is an American lingua franca, well represented across communities with very different ethnic compositions but also in more highly educated zip codes. So are martial arts clubs, which are found near yoga studios and evangelical churches, in racially diverse and highly educated neighborhoods—openness to alternative traditions and cultures is not distinctive to any one group of Americans. What emerges is a far more crosscutting and pluralistic picture of American life than many popular accounts offer, which stress black-and-white fragmentation without showing potential commonalities and opportunities for meeting “the other” in shared pursuits and activities.

We pursue these questions and more below. But throughout, the general importance of the scene to urban development comes through loud and clear. Cities grow and change not only because they have beaches or jobs, but also because they offer distinct scenes that attract different types of people.

The New Chicago School

The Bronzeville example illustrates why it was no accident that what became known as the Chicago School of urban sociology emerged in the city of Chicago, with its distinctive focus on the neighborhood and the local context.2 Because of our own focus on local context, we have often described our scenes approach as part of a New Chicago School.3 Highlighting the local scene extends the classic Chicago School focus on shifts in lifestyle across neighborhoods. Yet it abandons the Old Chicago School nostalgia for village life and rigidity about where different types of neighborhoods should be located (e.g., in concentric circles). At the same time, the New Chicago School approach adds a much more pluralistic, crosscutting, wide-ranging, and flexible sensitivity to the cultural themes that can differentiate and link neighborhoods. To better understand how a scenes-based New Chicago School extends and diversifies the ethnic neighborhood-based Old Chicago School, it helps to first go back to the classic idea of studying the local context and then see why it is important to expand our vision from the neighborhood to the scene.

The Types of Glue That Hold a Community Together Shift by Local Context

While Marxian analyses of urban change tend to downplay local context and stress abstract forces like industrialism or capitalism, these seemingly universal processes have their own local roots. Indeed, in some of the classic eighteenth-century English factory towns, manufacturing workers from many backgrounds were thrust together in new types of neighborhoods built around a factory. All of a sudden, their residences and daily contacts were determined primarily by proximity to their place of work and their role in that workplace. They came from far and wide to live near where the jobs were, and this—the job—was the common thread in their residential life, more than, or at least alongside, their homeland, language, or ethnicity.

In extreme cases like Pullman Town (outside Chicago) or Saltaire (near Bradford, England), whole towns were planned and built around the company, and workers were expected to rearrange their lives according to the fact that they were Pullman or Saltaire workers. In Saltaire, not the cathedral but the textile mill was at the center of the village. One worker described life as a Pullman employee as follows: “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell” (“Quote from a Pullman Laborer, 1883”).

Similar plans were developed elsewhere. George Steinmetz (1993) has shown how in late nineteenth-century Germany paternalism and ideology led the Social Democratic Party, corporate leaders, and local officials to agree to build housing for workers next to their factories. This model spread with socialism to Soviet areas and China.

But not everywhere. The link between work and residence is relative to the local context. Had Marx visited early twentieth-century Chicago, he would have seen this type of contextual relativism on the ground. Here, distinctive ethnic groups—Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Italian, and so forth—lived not near factories but instead built and lived near their own parishes; they often worked far away from their homes. Without the national state as a focus of ethnic identity, as in European nations, the neighborhood became central. Though Chicago is more extreme, America is dotted with Greektowns, Little Italys, Chinatowns, Little Portugals, and the like.

Box 5.1 The Chicago Saloon

Irish Catholic dominance of the political and governmental systems of the city is a fact of life in present day Chicago and has been so for many years. The first two major ethnic groups who came into the city from Europe were the Irish and the Germans. While the Germans were an important segment of the city’s body politics, the Irish had several advantages which they parlayed into a dominant political role. They spoke and understood English. They were familiar with the English local political and governmental institutions on which the American system was based. They were neutral outsiders in the traditional ethnic antipathies and hostilities which the Central and East European ethnic groups brought to America from their homelands. (“A Lithuanian won’t vote for a Pole, and a Pole won’t vote for a Lithuanian,” according to a Chicago politician. “A German won’t vote for either of them—but all three will vote for a ‘Turkey,’ an Irishman.”) And, finally, the Irish became the saloonkeepers in cities like Chicago, and the Irish-owned and -run saloons became the centers of the social and political activity not only for the Irish but also for the Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian, and Italian immigrants who poured into the city after the Irish and Germans. For where would an ethnic laborer go for recreation at night after his twelve-hour stint in the steel mills or the stockyards but to the local saloon?

— Milton Rakove, Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers (1975, 33)

This residential pattern—the ethnic neighborhood—reinforced ethnocultural styles through parades and food and bars and more. Saloons, church halls, and ethnic militias became the centers of social and political life, not only union halls and revolutionary cafes. Indeed, if we look to our amenities data, we find that to this day there is a strong correlation between the number of Italians who live in a given neighborhood and the number of Italian restaurants in that neighborhood, far stronger than for people of German, French, and Irish ancestry and “their” restaurants. Some new immigrants like Koreans or Jamaicans create new churches and restaurants in the same general manner.4 Even when people move away from the ethnic village, the density of shops, restaurants, churches, festivals, and the like in the old neighborhood provides a symbolic focus and a point of congregation at night and on weekends.

At the same time, when this spatial concentration of ethnic culture seems to be on the way to dilution, it can inspire feelings of anxiety and loss. Hence the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, with its claims about the fragmentary, conflictual, Nowheresville character of modern urban life, has its roots in its own distinctive neighborhood experiences: the Los Angeles of disconnected neighborhoods, large single-family homes in gated communities on sidewalk-free streets, freeway commutes, globetrotting stars, gangs, violence, and international media corporations. Even generalized claims about the schizoid character of modern life have their local bases.5

Where ethnic neighborhoods have been strong, religion, heritage, and culture have often provided more important bases of allegiance and enmity than has class. This is a legacy we saw clearly in chapter 3, documented in the number of family restaurants, parks, cemeteries, and churches in Chicago. Indeed, it is this strong linkage between residence and ethnic culture that is a central part of the answer to Werner Sombart’s classic question: Why is there no socialism in America? The (partial) answer is that in contexts like the United States in general and Chicago in particular, ethnicity and religion are often more important for politics than is class. But different contexts generate different answers, a theme to which we return in chapter 6.

The strong linkages in Chicago between neighborhood, ethnicity, religion, and culture made the typical Chicagoan into something of a cultural anthropologist. Different people have their own ways of life, their own ways of making sense of the world, which are manifested in their daily rituals, how far they stand apart, dinner table manners, home décor, leisure pursuits, and more. Chicagoans did not need to travel to the Amazon to learn this; they just walked across the park.

Marx’s intellectual disposition was to extrapolate what he saw in specific local contexts to impending global and epochal changes. Old ways of living together would be swept into the dustbin of history by the coming proletarian tide. The Chicago approach is more pluralistic and pragmatist: the strength of different types of social bonds varies in different local situations. In places where work and factories are the focus of life, jobs and class take center stage; elsewhere, other things matter more.

Box 5.2 An Old Chicago Joke

A man from China immigrated to Chicago. He opened up a laundry business in West Town, and worked day and night for decades without so much as taking a single day off. He prided himself on his English, conversing daily with his many customers. Finally, after over twenty years, he decided he had earned a break. So he took a trip downtown, to the Loop, to see the sights. To his amazement, nobody understood a word he was saying! He was beside himself. Had he suddenly forgotten everything he had learned in these twenty years? A friendly face pulled him aside, and whispered in his ear: “You want to know why nobody understands you?” He nodded. “You’re speaking Polish.”

— The authors

There Goes the Neighborhood

Scenes analysis extends this contextually sensitive neighborhood focus into a world in which not only the church and local pub but also the nightclub, the farmers’ market, the dance club, the yoga studio, and the dojo define the distinctive character of a place. This is similar to going “back to the land” as in chapter 4, while adding new and more wide-ranging cultural dimensions that affect people in more than their jobs. In chapter 4 this meant taking a more expansive view of how the character of a place influences economic growth, not only attending to physical soil or even Max Weber’s Puritan ethic. So too in this chapter: to go “back to the neighborhood,” we need a broader view of what “neighborhood culture” means to understand the energies that can make a place attractive for habitation and not only production. Hence extending the Old Chicago School neighborhood context means moving on to the New Chicago School scene.

This extension of “neighborhood” to “scene” is not an abstract claim. It has grown out of concrete local experiences, which the streets of Chicago made particularly evident. For if “you deliver your precinct, I’ll deliver mine” was the political result of Chicago’s everyday contextual relativism, it also made Chicagoans highly sensitive to new styles of life, new forms of group togetherness, making their way into their bars and restaurants. Thus it was in Chicago that a group label was forcefully applied to a new social type: the yuppie.

Given the strength of local cultural identity in Chicago, it was immediately apparent in the early 1970s that there were new characters on the scene. They stood out, for Chicagoans were always sensitive to “outsiders” in their midst. These newcomers were more likely to drink wine than beer. They engaged in strange new practices, like jogging or jazzercise. They were just as likely to be found in the yoga studio or meditation center as in the church. And so Chicagoans identified them by name—young urban professionals, yuppies—and treated them like any other ethnic group. They have their bars, and we have ours; they should live in their neighborhoods, and stay out of ours; and so on.6

Box 5.3 Apocalypse Now

“If the future is the apocalypse,” Bridgeport native and artist Ed Marszewski declaimed to the New York Times in February, “then Bridgeport is the community of the future.” Marszewski should know: as the leader of Lumpen, an artist collective headquartered in Bridgeport, and the editor of that organization’s eponymous periodical, Marszewski is used to making such statements in order to draw attention to a host of social and artistic causes he finds firsthand in the neighborhood’s warehouse shadows. History would seem to justify Marszewski’s macabre gesture. Bridgeport is arguably the most “Chicagoan” of Chicago communities; marked by a history of violent racism, class conflict and corrupt machine politics, the neighborhood includes the now-empty shells of stockyards and killing floors that made Chicago the “hog butcher to the world,” as well as the neon-lit whiskey frontier along 35th Street which waters the community’s blue-collar population during White Sox games.

Select Media Festival, held every fall, is staged solely in Bridgeport and emphasizes Lumpen’s liberal social agenda, which addresses poverty, discrimination and urban blight through artistic media. Version . . . better reflects Lumpen’s citywide appeal; events are scattered on the South and West Sides, while artists, visitors and gallery owners from throughout the city flock to Version’s main staging headquarters in Iron Studios . . . a quaintly refurbished, multi-storied exhibition center and artists’ living space nestled among the gaunt skeletons of distribution facilities and warehouses abutting Ashland Avenue.

Taylor remarks, “Bridgeport is certainly opposed to the North Side. . . .” . . . In the self-conscious universe of Version, however, where social progressivism is as prevalent as edgy artwork, the “g-word” [gentrification] is off limits. “The moment you say that, people’s heads will start spinning around while they projectile-vomit pea soup,” says Raver Emanuel.

— John Thompson, “The Art of the ‘Neighborhood of the Future’” (2007)

The cultural transformations of Chicago under Mayor Daley II (1989–2011) were in no small measure a product of applying the central principle of old Chicago politics to this new “ethnicity.” That principle is, figure out what they want, give it to them, and remind them where it came from. Hence the bike paths, flower gardens, indie rock festivals, and postmodern architecture that grace Chicago’s neighborhoods came accompanied by signs that told you their source: “brought to you by Mayor Richard M. Daley.”7

And this is Chicago! The pork butcher to the world, the city of broad shoulders, is now more and more a city of scenes that are a complex plurality of overlapping dimensions, with hipsters and yuppies and fratboys and metrosexuals as much a part of the cultural landscape as ward bosses and Irish saloons. In Bridgeport, the classic neighborhood base of the Daley machine, international Chinese artists mingle with the underground artist children of Polish restaurateurs, “blue-collar Bobos” we might call them,8 who host exhibitions and performances in their parents’ businesses and in former warehouses.

This diversification of identities and expansion of personal expression reflects a national pattern. Indeed, we find that one of the strongest predictors of a self-expressive scene is the percentage of the population reporting multiple ancestries. Yet these “fragmented” neighborhoods are neither nothing nor nowhere; they have their own types of scenes, which can be studied alongside the classic ethnic neighborhood, and with similar tools. In fact, a major theme in some discussions of postmodernism is that there can be grounded postmodern practices that celebrate irony, boundary crossing, and mixing categories rather than fixity, closed worlds, and purity. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” offered a classic exposition of this form of practice, extended more recently by authors like Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2007), who in The New Spirit of Capitalism associate playful irony with an “artistic critique” of contemporary capitalism that transforms standardized experiences into (potential) opportunities for authenticity.

Nor are the links between scene and residence exclusive to North America. Economists Oliver Falck, Michael Fritsch, and Stephan Heblich (2010) demonstrate that German cities with baroque opera houses were more likely than others to attract highly educated residents, who stimulated regional growth. They also cite a survey of about 500,000 Germans, which found that for highly educated workers “an interesting cultural scene” was among the most important factors in their location decision. Similarly, Clemente Navarro and colleagues (2012) show that scenes matter in Southern Europe as well, demonstrating that “the creative class” is highly likely to live in Spain’s “unconventional scenes.”

Box 5.4

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks. . . .

Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

— Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1966, 280)

In sum, in the new Chicago, as in cities worldwide, the differences that make a difference in choosing between one neighborhood and another have become far more culturally subtle and wide-ranging. They go beyond but still include the traditionalism and neighborliness of the pub or parish or the formality of the opera house. Hence our 15 dimensions and their many combinations naturally come into play as crucial drivers of residential patterns.

Scenes, Amenities, and Population Change

If Chicago precinct captains saw that neighborhoods were becoming defined by the subtleties of their scenes, it has taken social scientists longer to catch on. Early voices, like Paul Lazarsfeld or Daniel Bell, who questioned the traditional sociological assumption that “variations in the behavior of persons or groups in the society are attributable to their class or other strategic position in the social structure,” (Bell 1996, 37) were mostly drowned out.9 Manuel Castells’s (1983) The City and the Grassroots marked a major shift within the post-Marxist urbanist tradition, arguing that contemporary urban social movements were oriented toward the quest for communities based on “collective consumption goods” such as public transportation, education, the arts, and culture. From a different starting point, Terry Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset’s (2001) The Breakdown of Class Politics showed that classic left-right, union-capital divisions were becoming less salient politically in many different countries, while matters of taste, consumption, and quality of life were becoming more relevant.

Clark built on this idea in subsequent volumes. The New Political Culture (1998) (coedited with V. Hoffmann-Martinot) showed that an increasing number of mayors and city councils had added lifestyle and consumption issues to the centers of their agendas: the environment, amenities, gay tolerance, neighborhood aesthetics, and the like. The City as an Entertainment Machine (2004) followed by pioneering the study of how amenities drive urban migration, using data from the yellow pages for the first time to show that counties with more built amenities (like operas and juice bars) had rising numbers of young people, while older people were increasing in counties with more natural amenities (mountains, lakes).

Even economists reported examples of amenity-driven migration. Richard Florida’s (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class popularized this emerging consensus on the power of consumption rather than only production to drive population changes, adding a distinctive focus on clusters of artists and gays, dubbed “Bohemian,” as amenities in their own right, attractive to “the creative class.” And Edward Glaeser’s work on the “consumer city” argued that population growth was now driven more by what a city offered for consumption (restaurants, theaters) rather than for production (factories, warehouses) (Glaeser, Kolko, and Saiz 2001). Florida’s strong statement was reformulated by Clark and Glaeser (see the summary in Wikipedia’s “Richard Florida” entry as well as chapters by Florida, Glaeser, and Clark in Clark [2011a, chs. 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7]).

The scope of the shift becomes apparent when we note how even leading proponents of more traditional Marxian styles of analysis have added more explicit attention to culture in their concrete writings, for example, on urban development. One case in point is Harvey Molotch. His earlier Urban Fortunes (1987) (with John Logan) on the “urban growth machine” stressed business elites as driving urban development by rigging the political system in their favor. Since then he has softened his stance, and looked to cultural allure, and not only business and power machinations, as a key force driving urban change. Thus by 2011 Molotch himself was ready to declare a strong link between “the soul and migration” and to argue that factors beyond the political-economic are at play in determining how a place becomes the place it is and whether, and in what direction, it grows.

Another source of renewed attention to local culture in sociology comes from recent efforts at the nexus of urban and cultural sociology to rethink questions about purported “cultures of poverty.” For years after the infamous Moynihan (1965) report was published, social scientists, for instance, mostly stopped writing about the African American family—it became too politically sensitive, especially to document its decline.10 Then William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson pioneered work in the 1990s that reintroduced the centrality of the family to interpret many aspects of black life and culture.11

Box 5.5 The Soul and Migration

People sense . . . that they are more in simpatico with one type of place compared to another, and indeed with one particular place compared to another. The basis for their preference includes the vast range of subtle judgments that the sociologists and anthropologists of consumption (including even some critics of consumption) understand as within the repertoire of active and subtle choice making. We all know, as sociologists or not, that people are not self-maximizing automatons; they live in part through expressivity and aesthetic preference. Some regard their very lives as works of art, striving to make them lovely in some sense. . . . [There is a] link between migration and soul.

This does not mean that “hard” variables are not also at work; it helps to have sewerage and some kind of economic opportunity in the target destination. And manipulators of the political economy actively prepare the ground, as best they can, for effective exploitation of those they can attract. But within a range, migrants’ (and emigrants’) proclivities of style and sentiment come into play (literally, at times, play). And once in motion, there are mechanisms . . . that continue to reinforce their patterning. Graphic designers and police have about the same educational levels and similar incomes but their daily routines, consumption tastes, and voting behavior will differ—as will, pari passu, their destination ambition and how they will behave once present. Hence . . . New Hampshire and Vermont are matched in educational levels . . . [but] New Hampshire household incomes are actually substantially higher than those in Vermont. Factors besides the economic are in play and the standard add-in “cultural” variables, like religion or ethnicity, are not adequate to understand the selectivity mechanisms.

— Harvey Molotch, “Granite and Green” (2011, 155–59)

The issue continues to inform much discussion about social programs, lifestyle, cultural change, and more. In the process, “culture” returned to the sociological research agenda, but not as ostensibly positive or perverse values that attach to distinct groups (e.g., “Irish values are corrupt”).12 Instead the focus is on particular settings and activities, and how they do or do not build up important skills, social contacts, knowledge, and abilities. A person who grows up and lives in a place with high crime, poverty, and few amenities and services will likely have a distinct, and understandably oppositional, attitude toward his or her broader society.

Contemporary research has thus turned to local amenities and their potential role in changing the trajectory of black neighborhoods. Schools, daycare, churches, and community centers often feature prominently. Ethnographic studies suggest that such amenities can play key roles in establishing a circuit of neighborhood relationships that encourage mutual support, information sharing, and respect.13

In this period of intellectual ferment, there have been many names for social connections based on aesthetic sensibility, like “lifestyle enclaves” or “consumption communities” or “communities of taste,” as well as for what draws such groups to particular places, like “cultural ambiance,” “place aesthetics,” or our own “scene.” They all point toward something common. The style of life that a place makes possible is a key factor in defining what makes it an attractive place to live; scenes inspire the human habitat with meaning.14 And in some cases (as box 5.6 illustrates), the sense of belonging that comes from life in a scene can rival, or at least be mentioned alongside, that which comes from the most emotionally charged of all human bonds, that of the family—not unlike how the rise of ethnicity as a source of identity in nineteenth-century Europe drew its energy from metaphors from the extended family.

Box 5.6 The Scene as Extended Family

When we speak of ownership, we are speaking in an ideological or rhetorical sense, not an economic one. A city, by its very nature, is not owned; it is shared. Public space is public property. Especially for those of us—and there are many—unable to afford private property, a condo or house to call our own, public space is extremely important. Increasingly, our homes are outside: in the streets, on patios, in bars, on concert stages, in bookstores, in parks. Family extends beyond living room walls and includes the people who are in your band, who are on your basketball team, who help design your website and who are part of your burlesque act. The public is private and vice versa, always.

— Jason McBridge and Alana Wilcox, uTOpia (2005, 13)

Standard accounts of urban change, which typically focus more on socioeconomics and politics, tend to miss the significance of the scene in driving migration. One powerful example of how important this can be, however, comes in a recent study by sociologists Jason Kaufman and Matthew Kaliner on the different trajectories of Vermont and New Hampshire. Throughout the twentieth century, the two states have been quite similar socioeconomically, and in the beginning they did not differ substantially politically.

But through the early part of the century and especially from around the 1930s on (Kaufman and Kaliner 2011, 138), Vermont billed itself as a haven for people looking to live in close contact with nature and art in a generally relaxed tolerant environment. New Hampshire’s image, by contrast, was business friendly, tourist friendly, individualistic, with low taxes and easy access to big cities: “Live free or die” is on the state’s official license plate. Over the years, people from all over moved to the two states, often based on whether these images spoke to them. Hence Vermont shifted politically, moving from the right to the left to become the liberal stronghold it is now. New Hampshire remained more libertarian. One of Kaufman and Kaliner’s main pieces of evidence for the cultural dynamics of this shift: Vermont has far more Birkenstock stores, vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, hemp shops, and Ben and Jerry’s; New Hampshire, more Dairy Queens and Harley Davidson stores.

Home Is Where the Scene Is

All of this implies that a place with a scene that expresses the vibe, the feel, the mood, the ambiance with which you identify, with which you are simpatico, would be, all things considered, a more attractive neighborhood to live in than would one that does not. You should be more tuned into the scenes with which you resonate, and be more motivated, again all else being equal, to move or stay near one than would somebody whom the scene leaves cold, or even repulsed. Let us put this general proposition, as well as several more specific ones, to the test.

Critically Extending Past Work: Zip Codes versus Cities/States, Single Amenities versus Whole Scenes, Total versus Subpopulations, Mono- versus Multicausality

To do so, we critically extend in a number of ways much of the past work reviewed above. We have introduced most of these features of our approach before, but they are important again in the present context.

First, while most research on culture, amenities, and population change analyzes population changes at the city, county, or even state level, we start from the zip code. This analytical decision is rooted in familiar experiences. How often does one hear, “I’m moving to New York State!” or “Wisconsin, here I come!” Maybe sometimes, but generally states have less psychological relevance in most location decisions than do cities: “SF or bust!” or “Which way to Austin!” are more common slogans. Even so, there is so much variation (in scenes, education levels, racial composition, etc.) within cities (think, for instance, of Staten Island versus Manhattan), that only analyzing the city leaves us in the dark when it comes to the decision: Where, exactly, in which neighborhood, will I settle? That is, “in which Chicago neighborhoods would I be comfortable?” To tell which ones, we need to go down to smaller units.

While it remains important to include larger units, starting from the zip code allows us to assess the relative importance of small and big (from zip code up to county and state), and to ask whether, for instance, a city’s average rent, or overall job growth, affects, or even trumps, the scene-like qualities of the local area in location decisions. This is a simple point, but it differs from much research that typically investigates larger units and so is unable even to ask these sorts of questions.

Next, unlike most studies of amenities and population changes, we typically focus not on one or a few amenities but on hundreds (though we do sometimes examine smaller subsets to address specific hypotheses about key amenities). These thicker measures can be analytically critical since the overall cultural character of a place (what our scenes measures aim to capture) typically changes relatively slowly, but numerous discrete individuals and amenities move in and out. Thus, many experimental young people may move to a Greenwich Village, or Wicker Park, or Toronto’s Queen Street West for the generally self-expressive, transgressive, offbeat, and funky scene. Some stay as they age, but others move elsewhere when they have children or develop more moderate tastes, often to different scenes that combine self-expression with different dimensions, as we will see below. New young Bohemians or hipsters move in, and though particular businesses may change, these often continue the general ambiance of the scene—a body art studio opens, a tattoo parlor closes; a Thai-Mexican fusion restaurant closes, an Indian-Mexican fusion restaurant opens. The scene remains as the particular occupants change.

Yes, scenes do change and move, sometimes dramatically. The migration of New York’s alternative scenes to Brooklyn is a powerful example. But in the aggregate, they do so more slowly than do specific individuals and amenities. Scenes are ecological rather than individual-level phenomena. This is one major theoretical justification for why we typically treat scenes as independent variables and population changes as dependent variables.15

Moreover, instead of only analyzing changes in the total population of an area, we focus on subpopulations such as age groups, college and postgrads, artists, and African Americans. Simple as it is, this focus on subpopulations goes beyond much urban and community research, which looks for causes of growth or contraction in the total population. The problem with this standard approach is that it blinds us to the great diversity of processes at work behind overall population change, as many subgroups rise and fall for many different reasons. A city with relatively stagnant total population change can experience huge gains in some parts and declines in others. Or total population can be constant while the types of people in a neighborhood dramatically change. Thus it makes more sense to specify how distinct subgroups behave rather than to posit generalities about “what (all) people want,” like low taxes or warm weather.

In an ideal (analytical) world, we would be able to go beyond the relatively gross subcategories of the census, and find out not just how old somebody is or whether she graduated from college but also what kinds of books she reads and what types of restaurants she dines in, not to mention her personality. Then we could explicitly weigh the relative importance of her tastes versus her educational credentials in her location decisions. Alas, data like these, at a low-enough geographic level, if they exist at all, may be locked away in the digital vaults of the market research departments of major corporations.16

While we are therefore stuck with the census categories, we can still do a lot with them, beyond simply showing, which we do, that there are significant connections between scenes and where people in different age, ethnic, and educational groups live. Indeed, there is a reason the census divides up the population the way it does. These categories are and have been very important ways in which people define themselves and others.

At the same time, the census information can be used to show how scenes open up cracks within and build bridges across these classic divisions: by showing how, for instance, the same census groups are sometimes drawn to different scenes, how similar scenes sometimes appeal to multiple census groups, or how different combinations of scene dimensions have different impacts on the same census group. While this is all somewhat abstract right now, we elaborate below.

To do so, we return to our main Core variables, introduced in chapter 4, since they are relevant to residential as well as economic questions. Total county population is again important to account for, since many people live in and move to cities where there are already a lot of people, for all the opportunities—business, romantic, or otherwise—which that entails. We again include county rent as a proxy for general cost of living and affordability in the area. Accounting for the college graduate share of the population allows us to assess the importance of being near educated people in location decisions. Accounting for the nonwhite percentage of the local population allows us to assess the degree to which the racial composition of an area shapes where groups live and potentially moderates the impacts of scenes. Crime is clearly a major factor in location decisions, and so we again include the same crime data as in chapter 4. The rate at which a county voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 is a proxy for the area’s overall political orientation at the first time point in the analysis, which may influence which cities certain groups find hospitable or not. As in chapter 4, we include a variable for local cultural employment concentration. This variable can be interpreted as an indication both of the heightened artistic ambiance that more cultural firms and their staff can add to an area, as well as the job opportunities that such firms offer. And we again include as part of our Core model the Communitarianism/Urbanity scene measure, which allows us to ensure that any connection between a more specific scene or scene dimension is not simply a reflection of this most common American scene distinction.

To these we add two variables beyond the Core. First is the USDA’s index of natural amenities (lakes, mountains, etc.), because living close to nature may be an important consideration for many people, and natural amenities have featured prominently in past studies of amenities (Clark 2004; Zelenev 2004). Second is a measure of the county increase in total jobs, which accounts for a question we often receive in conference presentations: “Sure, the scene might be important when choosing a neighborhood, but is not the really important decision which city to live in, which is the place generating the most new jobs?”

All results we report for scenes are net of these other variables, that is, they show the strength of the connection between the scene and the census group (young people, college grads, etc.), accounting for, holding constant, or independent, of the education, rent, crime rate, density, and so on, of the local area. However, since we are concerned with scenes as one factor among many, and even as the overall character of the place in its entirety, which includes amenities and people and crime, and so forth, we also often report results for these other variables as well.

Young People Live in Scenes Where They Can Sow Their Wild Oats

A first set of questions about how scenes shape residential communities concerns the links between scenes and specific subpopulations: In which types of scenes do which types of people live? We start with age groups: young people (18–24, 25–34), baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1965), and retirees (i.e., persons 65 or older). Why age? For a number of reasons.

For one thing, especially since Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, many cities, officials, and researchers have been interested in the question of what attracts young people to a given place. The general idea is that with their youth they bring energy, vitality, openness to and tolerance of new ideas, and a kind of comfort with the growing diversity that increasingly characterizes American life. And they are often net contributors to the tax base. Some researchers even speak of the “youthification” of many urban areas (Moos 2014). We qualify this image below.

For another, whatever baby boomers touch, they change. Wherever they go, they come in numbers, often with large and open wallets, at least in the aggregate. But of course, there is much more to the boomer generation than size. Not least is the fact that the boomers have been in many ways pioneers of consumption (from the Beatles to the hula hoop), and it is unlikely that their interest in such things would disappear with age.

Third, retirees are growing as a segment of the population. It stands to reason that, at least for many of them, where to live is an open question, whether downtown near the opera or in the quiet countryside. And while much of the academic literature focuses on youth, retirees bring much free time, willingness to volunteer, and often a fair amount of discretionary income to wherever they settle. They are no longer job-bound, though their families matter. So detailing what attracts them is important as well to understand how and why communities are changing.

In what types of places do these age groups tend to live, and where are their numbers changing? Look at figure 5.2 to find out, which shows the associations of self-expression, transgression, and their combination with young people and baby boomers both in terms of their zip code population shares in 1990 and in terms of the difference between their 1990 and 2000 percentages of the population (we return to retirees below).17

Figure 5.2

This figure shows the impact of (YP) self-expression and transgression performance scores, as well as their interaction term, on six outcomes: (1) percentages of zip code residents 18–24, 25–34, and baby boomers (1990); (2) differences in the percentages of these same groups between 1990 and 2000. Black circles indicate statistically significant (p < 0.05) positive associations while hollow circles indicate statistically significant negative associations. Circle sizes are proportional to the magnitudes of coefficients from a multilevel model, where zip codes are the level 1 units of analysis and counties are level 2. In addition to these three scene variables, the full model includes the Core: county population, rent, party voting, and crime rate; zip code percentage college graduates; percentage nonwhite; cultural employment concentration; and our factor score measure of Communitarianism/Urbanity. Analyses in this chapter add to the Core: change in total jobs (1994–2001) and natural amenities. All analyses of change variables as outcomes include the corresponding level in the model (e.g., 1990 level of 25- to 34-year-olds for change in 25- to 34-year-olds, etc.). N is all US zip codes. More on variables and methods of analysis is in chapter 8 and the online appendix (press.uchicago.edu/sites/scenescapes).

Figure 5.2 contrasts the three age groups’ relations to the two scene dimensions. In 1990, both 18- to 24-year-olds and 25- to 34-year-olds composed, somewhat surprisingly, below average percentages of the population in the country’s more self-expressive scenes (net of the other variables in the model). Population shares of 18- to 24-year-olds were typically higher in more transgressive scenes, while the 1990 level of 25- to 34-year-olds was unrelated to transgression. However, from 1990 to 2000, 25- to 34-year-olds did rise (as a share of the population) in more transgressive scenes—in fact, of all variables in our model, only total county population was more strongly linked with growth in 25- to 34-year-olds than transgression. At the same time, again somewhat surprisingly, 25- to 34-year-old growth was unrelated to self-expressive scenes and 18- to 24-year-old growth was negatively related.

By contrast, 1990 levels of baby boomers were unrelated to transgression or self-expression. But Boomer population shares rose from 1990 and 2000 in these scenes. As the boomers aged, they grew more where self-expression was affirmed and transgression denied. The world of pottery classes and bookshops attracted more boomers than scenes of tattoo parlors and punk clubs.18

Should we conclude that young adults do not care about, or even resist, self-expression? No, if we remember that the overall scene includes combinations of dimensions. The results so far show a dichotomous choice between self-expression and transgression in isolation. Transgression seems to win.

But what if we combine the two?—not tattoo parlors or art galleries but both together in the same place. Statistically, one can identify this effect by multiplying two variables together, making what is called a multiplicative interaction term. Figure 5.2 also shows results for this interaction term, labeled “transgressive and self-expressive”

Figure 5.3 shows that, even when controlling for self-expression and transgression as separate dimensions, 18- to 24-year-olds and 25- to 34-year-olds are more concentrated where self-expression and transgression are combined. Growth in baby boomers by contrast was lower in such locations.19

Figure 5.3

This figure shows the impacts of 14 variables on two outcomes: (1) percentage of zip code residents aged 25–34 in 1990; (2) the difference in the percentage of this same group between 1990 and 2000. In addition to the variables listed in the note to figure 5.1, the model includes four scenes measures (plus Communitarianism/Urbanity, part of the Core): LA-LA Land, Rossini’s Tour, City on a Hill, and Nerdistan. These scene variables are factor scores based on a principle components analysis of the 15 scenes dimension performance scores for all US zip codes (summarized in chapter 8). See figure 5.1 notes for more detail.

These results also show that self-expression is not the sole property of the young. In fact, Stern and colleagues show that “knowing someone’s age or year of birth provides very little power in explaining his or her level of arts participation” (Stern 2008, 15). Moreover, if we look specifically at “Neo-Bohemian” amenities20 (like cafes, art galleries, etc.), we find (not shown) that these are often located not only where there are more young people but also where there are more older persons. As this goes fairly strongly against the grain of much recent research on urban growth and the arts, we have elaborated on this “gray creative class” elsewhere.21

Adding Multiple Complex Scenes

We can see the diversity of scenes to which people across and within age groups are drawn by looking not only at self-expression and transgression but also the overall patterns of scene dimensions.

Recall from chapter 3 that Communitarianism/Urbanity is the most typical US combination of dimensions. But there are other major complexes into which scene dimensions frequently combine:22

• LA-LA Land Tinsel is strong in glamour and exhibitionism. Examples of amenities correlated with this scene include nightclubs, tattooing, health clubs, beauty salons, custom T-shirt shops, body piercing, costume shops, dance companies, and automobile-customizing services; it has relatively few fishing lakes, hunting lodges, cemeteries, truck stops, campgrounds, convents, and public libraries. LA-LA Land has a strong presence in Downtown and West LA, as well as in Chelsea in New York and the Loop and Near North Side in Chicago.23

• Rossini’s Tour stresses both local authenticity and self-expression. Associated amenities include antique shops, marinas, fishing lakes, yoga studios, art galleries, used and rare bookstores, coffeehouses, bed and breakfasts, gardening, and outdoor recreation camps. Fast food, car dealers, truck stops, and churches are relatively rare. Places such as Sonoma and Marin Counties in California score high on this scene, as does Greenville, South Carolina.

• City on a Hill features egalitarianism and charisma, and less glamour. Associated amenities include public libraries, churches, and cemeteries; examples of relatively rare items include equestrian centers, yacht clubs, ski resorts, nightclubs, travel agencies, private tennis courts, restaurants, health clubs, nail salons, advertising agencies, art dealers, and interior design. This scene is strongest in the Midwest.

• Nerdistan, a term from Joel Kotkin, combines rationalism and formality. Correlated amenities include scientific and technical consulting services, legal offices, software publishers, R&D, business associations, professional organizations, and computer programming services. Examples of amenities that are relatively rare in Nerdistan include campgrounds, fishing lakes, liquor stores, talent agencies, recreational goods, antique dealers, tattooing, artists, and fashion designers. It is found more in the West and South.

Scenes Tell Us about Subgroups in Addition to Total Population Changes

Who tends to live near and move to these scenes? Total population grew in two of these scenes: Communitarianism and Rossini’s Tour (not shown). However, all these scenes are distinctly linked to specific subpopulations: not all scenes appeal to all people; different scenes resonate with some rather than others. Which and to whom? Figures 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 show which scenes are associated with which age groups.

Figure 5.4

This figure shows the impacts of 14 variables on two outcomes: (1) percentage of baby boomers (born 1945–1965) in 1990; (2) the difference in the percentage of this same group between 1990 and 2000. See the note to figure 5.2 for more details.

Figure 5.5

This figure shows the impacts of 14 variables on two outcomes: (1) percentage of retirees 65+ in 1990; (2) the difference in the percentage of this same group between 1990 and 2000. See the note to figure 5.2 for more details.

Figures 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 show proportions of young people, baby boomers, and retirees, as well as their changes. The figures are sorted by how strongly each variable is connected to the level of each age group in 1990.

What stands out first and foremost for young people (aged 25–34) is how urbane they are. They were most concentrated in big cities where crime and rent were high, natural amenities were low, and jobs were growing; they were in zip codes with relatively strong cultural industry clusters, high nonwhite population shares, and few college graduates; they increased more where there were more Democrats.24

Scenes are clearly important factors in accounting for the residential patterns of young people. Again contradicting the image of coolness as an inherent property of youth, however, is the fact that young people (25–34) were most strongly linked with Nerdistan-style scenes of rationalism and formality, and then after that with the generically less communitarian mix of transgression, utilitarianism, corporateness, state, rationalism, and glamour. However, they were also likely to be concentrated in LA-LA Land, which mixes glamour and exhibitionism, and to be increasing in such scenes. Young people were fewer and declined in a Rossini’s Tour mix of local authenticity and self-expression. Youth, to use a term from cultural studies, is a multivocal signifier.25

What about baby boomers? Through 1990, boomers were more concentrated in high rent, Democratic counties, among college graduates and near cultural worker concentrations, where crime and population were high, natural amenities and nonwhites were relatively rare, and jobs were growing. Scenes of Urbanity and Nerdistan tended to have relatively high boomer shares of the population; they made up lower shares of the population in City on a Hill scenes.

From 1990 to 2000, the types of zip codes where boomers increased most as a share of the total population were somewhat different. Growth was higher where there were more college graduates and few nonwhites, but, in contrast to their levels, growth was slower in Nerdistan and less communitarian scenes, shifting from the historic pattern of 1990 levels. Boomers moreover significantly increased in Rossini’s Tour scenes. This finding adds precision to figure 5.3: boomers have shifted not so much into self-expressive scenes per se but into those that mix self-expression with local authenticity (think yoga studios, coffee shops, gardening centers, together with art galleries). Boomer population growth was relatively weak in cultural employment clusters and LA-LA Land, and was unrelated to natural amenities.

Given their large numbers, this “great aesthetic migration” of boomers to new scenic pastures like Sonoma, California, or Asheville, North Carolina, may point toward a largely undocumented reshuffling of the urban landscape. The trend is hard to identify or explain without a theory of scenes and amenities data. Yet clearly, boomers have been on the move, and the scene has been a lodestone showing the way. These results underscore a policy point we stress in chapter 7: what attracts the young and the restless may turn others off; cities may benefit from a wide array of scenes, beyond LA-LA Land glamour, especially if the policy goal is to keep those twenty-somethings around as they mature.

And retirees, 65 or older? They made up larger percentages of the population in lower rent, lower crime, less populous areas with relatively weak job growth and many natural amenities, fewer college graduates and nonwhites but greater cultural worker concentration. Scenes in zip codes with retirees had a communitarian feel, a Rossini’s Tour’s combination of self-expression and local authenticity, a City on a Hill that fuses egalitarianism with charisma, and Nerdistan’s utilitarianism, corporateness, and formality.

While much of this picture comports with a fairly traditional image of where older persons would live (a small-town feel near natural amenities, consistent with Clark’s [2004] finding that older persons tend to live near natural amenities), other aspects point in a different direction, such as the strong connection with cultural employment clusters. The classic picture seems to have mostly persisted between 1990 and 2000, but there are differences. Retirees rose in zip codes with more college graduates and weak LA-LA Land and Nerdistan scenes.

Artist Concentrations: Not Only about the Rent

These results show that where Americans live is often clearly connected with a specific type of scene, with a specific cultural and aesthetic feel—even accounting for “harder” variables like rent, jobs, race, and education. From here, we can see how various scenes link to other key segments of the population, like artists.

Indeed, if urban analysts have recently discussed youth, they have been positively obsessed with people working in arts and culture. Much of the focus is economic, for the reasons in chapter 4.

But there are also more social and community issues linked with artists. Where there are more working artists, so the argument goes, neighborhood quality of life increases. Streetscapes tend to become beautified and street life more vibrant; new opportunities for community connection appear in art classes, studios, and shows.

But there is a dark side to artist growth. Artists are drawn to urban, inner-city neighborhoods with cheap rents and an air of risk, marginality, and diversity, often linked to crime and nonwhite persons. As artists work their magic, the neighborhood grows more attractive. Others, often white, well-off, college graduates, move in. Rents go up, and soon enough, not only the original inhabitants but also the artists themselves are pushed aside as ritzy condos and high-end restaurants replace dive bars and grungy music clubs. That is the standard gentrification story, in a nutshell.

While we cannot observe these processes directly with our data, we can catch some of them. We can ask, for instance, about where jobs in the arts and culture are most concentrated, where they have increased, and what characteristics such neighborhoods have. First, in what neighborhoods do artists concentrate?26 figure 5.6 has the answer.27

Figure 5.6

This figure shows the impact of 14 variables on two outcomes: arts concentration (1998) and change in arts concentration (1998–2001). These 14 variables are the same as those listed in the note to figure 5.2, except we removed cultural industry concentration and added change in zip code rent (to account for some gentrification dynamics). Change is measured as the ratio of 2001 to 1998 levels, and only includes zip codes that had any arts workers in 1998 (whereas the levels analysis includes all zip codes). We use here a more narrow measure of the arts in contrast to the broader cultural industry variable in our Core models. The narrow measure includes independent artists, writers, and performers, musical groups and artists, dance companies, other performing arts companies, theater companies, fine arts schools, art dealers, and motion picture theaters. We measure arts concentrations as a location quotient, that is, the share of each zip code’s total labor force that works in the arts compared to the national average. See notes to figure 5.1 for more details.

The arts live up to their general reputation. The strongest predictors of where arts jobs are concentrated include the percentage of college degree holders and county population size. Other important factors are LA-LA Land, Urbanity, and natural amenities. Crime rates and zip code share of nonwhite residents are also positively linked with artist clusters, as are City on a Hill and Rossini’s Tour.

Perhaps most intriguing here is that four out of five of the country’s most common combinations of scenes dimensions, even when controlling for one another and the other variables in the model, are positively and significantly linked with concentrations of people who work in the arts and culture. Artists are not only found in scenes of Urbanity, glamour, and exhibitionism, but also in Rossini’s Tour mixes of self-expression and local authenticity and City on a Hill’s mix of egalitarianism and charisma. “Artist” is a far from homogeneous category; its members range from countercultural rebels to church choir leaders to desert landscape painters. This internal differentiation shows up in their concentration in very distinct scenes and locales.

And what about rent, the usual centerpiece of the gentrification story? Our results show arts employment concentrated in higher rent areas. At the same time, we find no relationship between arts clusters and change in rent between 1990 and 2000.

This more complex picture of arts clusters persists if we look at places where artists grew more concentrated from 1998 to 2001. Admittedly, this is not a big enough time period to draw general conclusions.28 Moreover, only some US zip codes have any arts employment whatsoever (about 10,000), and there is little difference between where growth occurred and where concentrations were already high, relative to the country as a whole. Artists, contrary to some popular narratives, do not appear to move incessantly into new terrain. It is thus useful to look at only those zip codes where some arts jobs are present, and the factors related to increased concentration of the arts therein (measured as a ratio of the 2001 to the 1998 location quotient).

The results (in figure 5.6) are intriguing. Arts employment concentration increased in smaller counties with less crime, and in zip codes with more college graduates and smaller 1998 artist clusters. County rent was insignificant, as was change in zip code rent. Three of the five scene factor scores, however, were significant: arts jobs concentrated more in stronger Communitarian and Rossini’s Tour scenes and weaker Nerdistan scenes. That is, not the most urbane, populous, or low rent areas, but areas with scenes that include local authenticity, neighborliness, tradition, and self-expression.

Urban analysts Carl Grodach and Michael Seman come to a similar conclusion about going beyond the standard variables in their analysis of the cultural sector during the Great Recession after 2007. They find

no clear evidence that artists or other cultural sector workers are increasing in affordable, older industrial metros like Detroit and Cleveland whether due to migration from more established cultural hubs, as has been widely reported in the popular media, or otherwise. Both of these regions, which possess below average concentrations of cultural sector employment, have endured declines during the recession not only for cultural occupations as a whole, but for artists in particular. Altogether, the correlation coefficient for cost of living and cultural sector employment growth is weak (.122) and not statistically significant. (Grodach and Seman 2013, 19)

Even in a time of general economic recession, cost of living is a relatively weak determinant of growing arts employment.

And this all stands to reason. Take Chicago’s Wicker Park as an example, one of the paradigm cases of artist-led neighborhood change. Measured against the average US zip code, rent in Wicker Park was likely never low—if low rent was the issue, there is always Toledo. Of course, rent matters at the margins, but so does much else. What Wicker Park had, like Toronto’s West Queen West or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, was relatively close proximity to existing artist networks, relatively easy access to downtown (for gigs and jobs and other opportunities), a certain sense of dangerousness and excitement (like prostitutes and drug dealers on the corner), and a base of divey, dingy amenities (like bars and restaurants) that appealed to Bohemian images of the starving artist—along with somewhat lower rents than many other North Side neighborhoods.

This may not dramatically alter the overall gentrification story, in that once arts establishments arrive the scene may change in ways that invite new residents. But it does suggest that a one-track model, with simple economic and demographic forces driving inexorably from cheap-rent-seeking artist pioneers to their yuppie successors, is too simple. As we saw in chapter 4, for instance, Bohemian scenes lead to job and population growth in more traditional communitarian cities, but not as much in more urbane cities, where there already are many artists and an arts-friendly social environment.

The point is not that the arts sector “never” cares about rent and “does not” initiate gentrification; we do not want to replace one unidimensional theory with another. It is simply that there are many variables and variants at work. The question is when, where, and why some lead and others follow, and vice versa.29

And there are many more local variants than the standard story would admit. Thus, strong ethnic neighborhoods may resist (or modify) the “first” stage of gentrification by controlling access to housing or making sure that their (sometimes) artist children get first crack, as in St. Louis’s (Irish) “the Hill” neighborhood or Chicago’s (Irish and Polish) Bridgeport. Politically organized arts advocacy groups can (sometimes) lobby city government to keep a foothold in the neighborhood even after new nonartists arrive (as in Toronto’s West Queen West). Arts groups can work with government agencies to provide jobs to local residents in their offices (as Deborah Leslie and Norma Rantisi document in the case of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal’s Saint-Michel neighborhood). And “social preservationists,” as documented by Japonica Brown-Saracino, sometimes organize to preserve the historic human ecology of neighborhoods even as gentrifying newcomers move in. Many of these variants and more are documented by Grodach and Silver (2012) in The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives.

Bronzeville and Beyond

Bronzeville, as we saw above, embodies some core cultural dimensions central to many African Americans: the biblical hope for a world better than ours, based in the equality of all persons before God; the charismatic presence of the fiery preacher, the musician, or the great athlete. At the same time, these are joined by energetic nightlife, bright fashion, dance, innovative music, and a playful flamboyance in dress and appearance, mixed with an often-critical and countercultural stance toward mainstream American society and culture. This combination of historic links to deep religious and cultural currents in African American history together with emergent scenes of wide-ranging entertainment options and cultural facilities surely played a role in Bronzeville’s recent and relatively dramatic growth, led especially by middle-income African Americans.

But how unique is Bronzeville?

Figure 5.7 shows that Bronzeville is far from the exception. Rather, it looks more like a paradigmatic instance of a broader pattern. In 1990, America’s neighborhoods with higher black percentages of the population tended to be in Democratic counties with relatively high crime, weak job growth, and few college graduates in the zip code. Such neighborhoods often had scenes that evoked classic prophetic biblical themes—the egalitarianism, neighborliness, tradition, and charisma characteristic of Communitarianism and City on a Hill scenes—as well as the rationalism and formality that characterize Nerdistan. However, between 1990 and 2000, African Americans shifted away from scenes of Communitarianism (even if in 2000 black population shares remained higher in Communitarian than Urbane scenes); at the same time they grew in the LA-LA Land mix of glamour and exhibitionism while continuing to increase in City on a Hill.30

Figure 5.7

This figure shows the impact of 13 variables on two outcomes: (1) the percentage non-Hispanic black residents in 1990 and (2) difference in in the percentage of this same group between 1990 and 2000. These 13 variables are the same as those listed in the note to figure 5.1, except that percentage nonwhite was not included as a predictor.

Box 5.7 Confessions of a Black Gentrifier: When Demographic Change Doesn’t Involve Color

If you ask Aisha Moore about gentrification, her first inclination is to scoff. Moore, a black resident of Congress Heights, says her Ward 8 street is “100 percent black” and that’s not likely to change soon. “Nobody leaves,” she jokes. “On my block, if new people bought a house, it’s because an old lady died.” Yet Moore isn’t from D.C. and has only lived in the city since 2002, after she finished an undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2004, her boyfriend bought a house in Congress Heights and she moved in with him in 2009.

Which, by every metric except one—skin color—makes her as much of a gentrifier as the young white residents unloading moving vans near U Street NW every weekend. As we talk, Moore says she’s frustrated by the dozens of stories that feature handwringing over D.C. becoming “less black,” because they paint an incomplete picture. “I get it, in terms of numbers, but it’s annoying. The story over here, east of the river, is all about black gentrification,” she says. “Black people are moving back to Anacostia and the Congress Heights area.” . . . “There are different types of people here, but that doesn’t water down the chocolate,” she says, with a laugh. . . .

“Gentrifier” can’t be equated with “white person.” After all, most poor people in this country are white (though it’s definitely a numbers game; whites are still less likely to be poor than blacks and Latinos—there are just more of them). The gentrifier is a person of privilege, and even if she doesn’t have much money, she’s got an education and a network of friends who are striving like she is, and she has the resources to at least try to get what she wants. . . .

Living in Columbia Heights, Chris Wallace feels conflicted. His reception in the neighborhood varies by what he’s wearing. If he changes out of his suit and into sneakers and jeans after heading home from his job as a mortgage loan officer, getting a drink at a local watering hole, now overrun with young professionals, can feel uncomfortable. But it cuts both ways. “Even the younger people of color in the neighborhood, how, what, or if they speak to me depends on what I’m wearing,” he says. . . .

“I’m a black male in D.C. and I have never been to jail and I have a job. I can’t help but be present to that,” Decker Ngongang says. He describes a recent outing when he took the day off from work: “I walked to the Starbucks at 14th and Irving and there may have been 100 black males that I passed who were doing nothing in the middle of the day.” It’s frustrating, he adds. “A lot of my black male peers are lost sometimes. What the hell do we do?” . . .

Ngongang deals by finding “little things” he can do, like talking to kids in his neighborhood, and using his seat at a table with other non-profits to help them understand the context underperforming students are living in.

— Shani O. Hilton (2011)

These results fit broadly with the notion of the “the new great migration” (Frey 2004), where many African Americans are moving away from declining Rust Belt areas and into major southern metropolises, like Atlanta and Memphis, and to many suburban areas. However, our results are broader than this: if we add the South to our model as a control variable, we find that, while black population shares increased in the southern zip codes (between 1990 and 2000), the impacts of scenes on African American migration were not altered. Southern or not, zip codes with concentrations of cultural industry workers, scenes of Urbanity, egalitarianism and charisma, glamour and exhibition, saw increases in African Americans—and this, again, independent of rent, education, population, crime, and other variables in our core model.31

A Great Divide?

Much academic research on population shifts and gentrification is by demographers and economists who are traditionally insensitive to more holistic and cultural factors like scenes. The strength of the above results, however, suggests that analytical attention to scenes and amenities has much to offer. And not only to them.

The American media and many public intellectuals often invoke themes of division, separation, and fracture among American residential communities. Conflict is news; nonconflict is boring. What are the main themes and how grounded are they?

Commentators stressing division come from across the political spectrum. In Coming Apart (2013), conservative Charles Murray traces a cultural division of American neighborhoods. On the one hand are “superzips” full of college graduates who maintain classic American civic and family values while leading culturally bubbled lives set apart from their working-class compatriots; on the other are working-class communities where, he argues, these virtues have weakened and positive role models are rare. This division, he suggests, is reinforced by the fact that each group has its own distinct consumption and lifestyle habits, with, for instance, college graduates favoring foreign films and noncollege graduates favoring Hollywood blockbusters. Moderate Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort suggests a related kind of division: as Americans move more and more based on lifestyle preferences, they end up increasingly sorting themselves residentially by politics. Liberals go to where the Starbucks, organic grocers, yoga studios, and Apple stores are; conservatives go to where there are churches, gun shops, and NASCAR. The result is intensified partisanship and mutual misunderstanding, as fewer people bump into those others from the other side of the aisle in their day-to-day neighborhood interactions. Similarly, Richard Sennett (2012), a man of the left, argues in Together that Americans are losing touch with “the craft of cooperation,” as “democratic rituals” of listening and discussing give way to conflict and a tribal us-versus-them attitude throughout society.

This sort of rhetoric of loss, conflict, decline, division, and fracture is as old as America itself, making one wonder when exactly the unified, coherent time before the current crisis of community was. An alternative sees community ties as multiplex. Both conflict and consensus are present at the same time.

This more mixed picture is what sociologists Claude Fischer and Greggor Mattson (2009) found when they reviewed decades of research on the question, is America fragmenting? They found increasing ideological polarization among political elites and activists since the 1970s but more commonality in the general electorate—and nothing like the level of past animosity that led to deep conflagrations like the Civil War. Race and ethnicity remain strongly correlated with divergent life chances. And yet racial residential segregation, while still high, has been decreasing in recent decades; racial intermarriage, while low, has been increasing. There is evidence of proliferating cultural styles and options, and more wide-ranging, “omnivorous” tastes; but whether this amounts to fracture or simply plurality is unclear. The most rapidly increasing disparity is in education, as college-educated persons have grown more likely to intermarry, to live in the same neighborhoods, and to share common tastes.

Box 5.8 “Morality in an Age of Contingency”

I will not lament a process of ongoing fragmentation, of the loss of all values in our time, of the disappearance of community or trust or commitment or the social significance of character formation. Such jeremiads are so common in current debates about values and morality that they constitute a rhetorical genre of their own—both in the social sciences and in cultural criticism. They can be found in conservative as well as in progressive versions. The mere fact of their being a genre of their own can already sensitize us to the schematizations and narrative restrictions imposed by this genre.

When the American historian Thomas Bender searched American historiography to locate the exact date of the triumph of individualism and materialism over the ideals of Puritan community life, he discovered that such a claim has been made for practically all points in time since 1650. Desperately he asked: “How many times can community collapse in America?” (1978: 46). Similarly, we should ask ourselves when the time before the alleged contemporary fragmentation of society is said to have been—and whether we really do justice to contemporary changes if we constantly force them into the framework of loss and decline.

— Hans Joas, “Morality in an Age of Contingency” (2004, 392)

Starting from this more tempered view suggests some general propositions about how amenities might or might not correlate with America’s major social divisions, in particular education and race. On the one hand, we would expect certain types of amenities to have relatively narrow geographic and demographic reach and to thus be relatively strongly correlated with educational and racial residential concentrations. On the other, these correlations should be only moderately strong. We could add that there should be certain types of amenities that have broader appeal, extending into both America’s more- and less-educated neighborhoods, as well as into areas in which people of diverse races reside.

To examine these general propositions more precisely, we shift from more abstract performance score measures of scene dimensions to specific amenities, selecting four types to assess the lines of conflict suggested by standard commentaries. The first two capture types often discussed as conflicting: “New Age” lifestyles versus conservative evangelical Christianity. The second two are more widely shared: popular culture and martial arts. Below we discuss each of these types in detail, and measure them with indicators from our amenities database. Analyzing their location offers insight into the types of practices and experiences that are more broadly shared or more narrowly pursued across American communities. It also points toward a more ecumenical conception of religious-ethical organizations: churches compete and commingle with other cultural and leisure options—arts, sports, music, yoga, karate, and more—as parts of the wider scenes that people may choose to join, defining their allegiances and animosities in the process.

Two major themes emerge in the results. On the one hand, many Americans seem to live in scenes apart: whites and college graduates near New Age amenities; nonwhite and less-educated near evangelical churches. On the other hand, these differences are less hard-and-fast than they might first appear: popular culture and martial arts seem to bridge the apparent New Age–evangelical cultural divide.

New Conservative Churches: Racial Bridging, Educational Divide32

A major and consistent finding in the sociology of religion—confirmed again in Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace—is that, especially since the 1960s, membership and participation in mainline churches has declined. By contrast, conservative evangelical Christianity has been ascendant.

American popular discourse links the rise of conservative evangelical Christianity to the religious right and Moral Majority. Because these movements are connected to the Republican Party, with a reputation for not welcoming ethnic diversity, some draw the inference that evangelical churches are populated by less-educated whites. Their strict sexual morality is then construed as a traditional reaction against the tidal wave of modernity, in its many aspects, from individualism to diversity.

There are many grains of truth to this. In fact, the academic literature often reports that religiously conservative churches, like Southern Baptists, are historically linked to racially segregated worship and opposition to government assistance to African Americans. And, as we show in chapter 6, the evangelical Christian percentage of a county’s population is one of the most powerful ways to predict whether it votes Republican or Democratic. Accordingly, evangelicals have figured prominently in many of the debates about America’s culture divide. Yet the story is more complex.

One of the most significant religious trends in the second half of the twentieth century has been a truly global growth of conservative Protestantism, not only in the United States. Growth has been strongest among new or historically marginal strains, such as Pentecostalism. The evangelical movement in America is just one part of this bigger surge, which involves huge numbers of conversions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (especially Korea). Synthesizing research on this worldwide movement, one of the leading sociologists of religion, David Martin (2005), concludes that the rise of Pentecostalism is a distinctively modern religious phenomenon, one centered on ecstatic personal experience and the charismatic leaders who help people get there. He further suggests that the rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America especially has fostered an individualistic ethos of personal discipline and cultivation, connected with greater community leadership roles for women and heightened demands for sobriety and family commitment from men.

In the United States, these “new line conservative” churches, or “New Cons,” often understand themselves as outsiders, operating at the margins of the old-guard Protestant establishment. Many of them actively portray themselves as racially neutral, operating beyond or outside the cleavages that have traditionally divided American society. They often include enthusiastic or charismatic worship styles, replete with rock bands and multimedia performances, that help break down traditional social norms about who should associate with whom (cf. Collins 2008; Dougherty and Huyser 2008; Marti 2009). Their combination of individual fervor, charismatic leaders, and egalitarian visions of equality before God, along with strict adherence to divine authority, carries forward the biblical tradition of the City on a Hill in a contemporary context.

These New Cons resemble what Max Weber called inner-worldly activists: missionaries, an army of God, out to reshape the world in His image. Accordingly, many press their members to invite diverse guests to their services. They establish branches in inner-city neighborhoods and actively recruit new members from all races. Nobel laureate economist Robert Fogel has called this upwelling the “fourth great awakening” of evangelical fervor in American history. The preceding three he links with the Revolution, abolitionism, and the concern with material and gender equality that led to the New Deal and women’s suffrage; this one he links with a societal move toward concern with the distribution of “spiritual” rather than “material” goods.

Box 5.9 Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide?

One Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus’ words “Love thine enemy.” As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels’ preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy blond but now white. Indeed, if there is a whiter preacher currently running a megachurch, that man must glow.

Yet neither Hybels’ sermon, nor his 23,400-person congregation, is as white as he is. Along with Jesus, he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. Then he introduced Shawn Christopher, a former backup singer for Chaka Khan, who offered a powerhouse rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” As the music swelled, Larry and Renetta Butler, an African-American couple in their usual section in the 7,800-seat sanctuary, exchanged glances. Since Hybels decided 10 years ago to aggressively welcome minorities to his lily-white congregation, Renetta says, few sermons pass without a cue that he is still at it. “He always throws in something,” she says. She’s been around long enough to recall when this wasn’t the case. . . .

. . . [I]n some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion’s most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.

Call it the desegregation of the megachurches—and consider it a possible pivotal moment in the nation’s faith. Such rapid change in such big institutions “blows my mind,” says Emerson. Some of the country’s largest churches are involved: the very biggest, Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Community Church in Houston (43,500 members), is split evenly among blacks, Hispanics and a category containing whites and Asians. Hybels’ Willow Creek is at 20% minority. Megachurches serve only 7% of American churchgoers, but they are extraordinarily influential: Willow Creek, for instance, networks another 12,000 smaller congregations through its Willow Creek Association. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that “if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could be one of the final steps transcending race as our great divider”—and it could help smooth America’s transition into a truly rainbow nation.

— David Van Biema (2010)

A significant, but not uncontested, body of research suggests that new conservative churches do in fact often reach across racial divides. Thus, Robert Putnam found that evangelical Protestant congregations are more likely to be racially diverse than are liberal-moderate, mainline Protestant ones.33 Michael Emerson found that large evangelical congregations had “dramatic growth” in racial diversity between 1998 and 2007: only 6 percent of such congregations were classified as ethnoracially diverse in 1998 but 25 percent were by 2007. Almost 20 percent of American Latinos are now evangelical Protestants. Similarly, others (such as Joseph Yi) find that racial diversity is especially pronounced among New Cons—those new or less-established strains of evangelical Protestantism, including the typically “nondenominational” megachurches, that are not affiliated with the more-established Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, or Presbyterian denominations.34 As we note below, we too find that conservative evangelical churches are more strongly associated with racially diverse neighborhoods than are mainline Christian churches.

There is another side to the growth of the conservative evangelical movement, however. New conservative churches have sometimes been more successful than other American churches in reaching across the country’s racial cleavages. But the evangelical commitment to strict moralism and literalist adherence to biblical authority tends to fall flat among college graduates, who are, on average, liberal in morals and relativist in culture—though these sorts of averages can of course mask internal variation.

These general propositions suggest some specific empirical generalizations, which we pursue below: neighborhoods with many New Con churches should have (a) higher levels of overall racial diversity, (b) higher nonwhite shares of the local population, and (c) lower college graduate shares of the population.

New Age Spirituality: New Spiritualities and Divisions

Resistance to the evangelical biblical message from the most educated segments of American society has its own logic. Indeed, new line conservative evangelical Protestantism was not the only religious movement, or even the best known, at least in the popular discourse, to gain strength in the ferment of the 1960s. There were also the hippies, who sought new modes of consciousness, an enlightened religion of Love, and a New Age of Aquarius.

College campuses were key incubators for the new spiritual ideas that emerged from the 1960s counterculture. Of course, not all campuses were hotbeds of Free Love, but places like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Columbia, among others, were major launching pads. And the country’s most enduring center of New Age spirituality, the secluded Esalen Institute on California’s rugged Big Sur coastline, was founded by two students from Stanford’s comparative religion department. There they found behind all the world’s religions—East and West—a common Divine Spring, which goes beyond any particular authorities, teachers, and dogmas, flowing through All Being.35

Box 5.10 The Essential Lingua Franca of the New Age: Self-Spirituality.

The great refrain, running throughout the New Age, is that we malfunction because we have been indoctrinated—or, in the New Age sense of the term, been “brainwashed”—by mainstream society and culture. . . . To live in terms of such mores, inculcated by parents, the educational system and other institutions, is to remain the victim of unnatural, deterministic and misguided routine. . . .

Perfection . . . cannot be found by tinkering with what we are by virtue of socialization. Neither can it be found by conventional (political, etc.) attempts at social engineering. Perfection can be found only be moving beyond the socialized self . . . To experience the “Self” itself is to experience “God,” the “Goddess,” the “Source,” “Christ Consciousness,” the “Inner Child,” the “Way of the Heart,” or, most simply and, I think, most frequently, “inner spirituality.” Experiences of the “Higher Self” . . . stand in stark contrast to those afforded by the ego. The inner realm, and the inner realm alone, is held to serve as the source of authentic vitality, creativity, love, tranquility, wisdom, power, authority and all those other qualities which are held to comprise the perfect life.

— Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement (2003, 18–19)

Perhaps the central feature of the new spiritual awakening was a rejection of authority and a concomitant turn to the self. Each of us must find our own personal way to bliss; nobody can do it for us. “Outside” and “external” authorities cannot show the way. They are at best signposts whose directions must be individually tested; at worst, stumbling blocks seeking to replace your own experience, your own journey, with dead letters, secondhand reports, and crushing conformism. As sociologist Paul Heelas puts it, “If there is too much external authority—theistic, traditionalized, polytheistic—one can conclude that one is no longer with the New Age” (2003, 25).

Just as important to the New Age is rejecting traditional, especially Christian, puritanical attitudes toward the body. The body is not a seething tempest of sin and temptation to be dominated, mastered, and controlled. Rather, the body “knows”; its impulses and instincts are the seeds of meaningful attunement to the world; they must be generously cared for, cultivated, awakened, released, loved. Kripal notes that the Esalen Institute was a pioneer in numerous novel bodily practices, not only yoga and body work, but also jogging.

These two elements—a search for sources of spirituality beyond Western Christianity and in the body itself—made New Age spirituality highly open to Eastern imports, in particular Yoga. Of course, much in Eastern religious tradition—for instance, the authority of the guru—did not fit comfortably with self-spirituality. Still, enough did, and much was reinterpreted in the new American context.

Particularly attractive, as Heelas argues in discussing the growth of Buddhism in the United Kingdom, were “forms of eastern spirituality which emphasize world-rejection” (1986, 55). “World-rejection” is a term that comes from Max Weber, and New Age spirituality rather closely approximates what he called the “passive-otherworldly” way of rejecting “the world.” Rather than actively working in the world to change it, one must “let it be,” retreat to some sanctuary, meditate, contemplate, and wait for divine revelation to come to you. Hence the New Age movement flourished in the mountains of the California coast and the deserts of New Mexico.

This “self-spirituality” of course has deep roots in American culture, as does the mixing of East and West. New Age ideas clearly evoke themes that carry forward ideas from Emerson to Whitman, many of which congeal in this volume’s notion of individual self-expression. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, Indian Vedic and Yoga philosophies entered the United States in the salons of New England literati, attended by the likes of William James.36 His “Gospel of Relaxation” adumbrated key themes that would later animate the New Age movement as it spread from Cambridge salons to Whole Foods message boards (Bender 2010, 106–12).

Box 5.11 Mixing East and West in the New Age

Dick [Richard Price, one of Esalen’s founders] received the name Geet Govind from the guru (through the mail) and began planning what would become a month-long trip to Poona. This was big news at Esalen, as it seemed to suggest that one of the basic ground rules was about to be broken, or at least seriously tested. “No one captures the flag.” No gurus. But now there was a guru, and one of the founders at Esalen appeared to be submitting to his teachings. . . .

That didn’t happen. Dick spent the first two weeks in the ashram’s meditation facility, where things went reasonably well. Then he moved into the encounter group sessions and participated in a session with an English psychotherapist. . . . Still well enough. Then in a session next door, a woman got her leg broken in a fight, apparently generated by the group session. This upset Dick deeply. What sealed his rage, however, was a second scene involving Rajneesh himself. Shortly after the broken bone, a woman stood up in the question-and-answer session and asked the guru about the violence. She questioned whether this was really necessary. According to Dick, Rajneesh not only did not respond to the question; he turned on the woman and tried to intimidate and shame her into silence. That was it for Dick. . . .

Later, he wrote to Time . . . “Rajneesh . . . can speak brilliantly of the transformative possibility of human life. . . . However, the ashram ‘encounter’ group is an abomination—authoritarian, intimidating, violent—used to enforce conformity to an emerging orange new order rather than to facilitate growth. . . . I am content to be known as ‘Richard Price’ rather than as ‘Geet Govind.’”

— Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen (2007, 364–65)

Since its rapid growth in the heady days of the 1960s, various forms of “being spiritual but not religious” have flourished and spread (Wuthnow 2007). Heelas (with collaborator Linda Woodhead) estimates that, as of 2001, upwards of 900,000 people in the United Kingdom are active in “the holistic milieu” of acupressure, astrology, Eastern religion, yoga, shiatsu, and the like (2006, 47). Data are less precise in the United States, but their estimate is somewhere between 5 and 20 million American holistic practitioners.

This growth, however, has not extended much past the initial milieu in which the New Age was born. Heelas and Woodhead’s own survey of a small British town shows this. They find that the spiritual revolution has mostly been restricted to white, (now) middle-aged women who work in people-oriented professions. Other studies have yielded similar results, finding that yoga practitioners are mostly higher-income, highly educated, white women (Birdee et al. 2008), and that “mind-body-spirit” activities in the Boston area are practiced disproportionately by people with high levels of education, with around 90 percent holding a college degree, and 70 percent of yoga practitioners in particular holding postgraduate degrees (Oh and Sarkisian 2012). Our results (below) also suggest that the New Age tends to be strongly correlated with education.

This type of growth pattern is in many ways implied by the very inward, passive, meditative character of New Age spirituality. For if unique personal self-expression is the gold standard, it is imperative that nobody be “forced” to join, that devotees not be commanded or ordered to do missionary work, to reach out to people who may not “want” to be saved. Better to be a beacon of hope, leave the light on—or be the light—and be open to anybody ready to listen who might walk through the door. While there is a spiritual nobility to this, one of its practical, social consequences is that people who are not already disposed to the New Age message are relatively unlikely to respond to it.

Box 5.12

The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. . . .

. . . We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease. . . .

. . . Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.

— William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation” [1899] (1911, 59, 65, 70)

Box 5.13 Mystically Zooming around without Touching

Paula interrupted, “Yes—that was really great. When we are asked to imagine a person, I thought of George W. Bush. I always think of him as a child, like a little boy, immature and childish. So when Cathy said to send him love, I thought of him as a baby and sent my love to him as a child. But also, when she said that we should send our love to the people of Iraq, it was really vivid, I felt like I was zooming in. I actually saw a mother and a child together, and she was holding the child in front of what looked like their house. . . .”

. . . While the mystics gathered in the space of the chapel were hoping for peace and justice, and Cathy’s visualization led us through familiar tropes of critique of American foreign policy and war-mongering, the entire ritual reproduced a spiritualized imperialism, where those in the United States could travel quickly and effortlessly to other parts of the world, and lift up both spiritual and “real” women and children from the lock of spiritual and political tyranny, enter into others’ hearts, and then return untouched to the familiar. The worst that one could suffer was a “prick” of an evil heart, but even this terror could be overcome by a protective shield of mystical light.

— Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals (2010, 178, 180)

Nevertheless, some practices, especially yoga, have made headway among American Christians. The more popular Hatha variants stress health and fitness more than other “mind-body-spirit” practices do (Oh and Sarkisian 2012, 301), helping minimize potential cultural clashes with Christian teachings. Indeed, the “Christian yoga” movement aims to actively integrate Christian faith with yoga (Alter 2003; Cullen-Mahtomedi 2005; also cf. Knaster 2011; Morris 2010), and yoga classes have become more common at local YMCAs and some mainline churches. Brooke Boon, a conservative Christian, founded and marketed “Holy Yoga,” including 475 certified instructors in 10 countries (C. G. Brown 2013a, 45–46). Self-expression is by no means antithetical to religious communities, Christian or otherwise.

But these efforts to integrate the self-expressive orientation embodied in yoga and New Age practices into contemporary American Christian practice sometimes meet strong resistance from conservative Catholic and evangelical elites. In 2003, the Vatican and the Southern Baptist leadership flatly rejected New Age beliefs and practices, including some forms of yoga (Stammer 2003). And Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle’s hip, evangelical Mars Hill megachurch, denounced yoga as “demonic,” arguing that it is impossible to disconnect yoga’s pantheistic spirituality from its physical techniques (Driscoll 2011). Yoga’s disputed status informs vocal debates over its incorporation into the public schools. A 2013 legal battle in Encinitas, California, pitted supporters who emphasized the health/fitness benefits for children, such as physical exercise, mindfulness, and stress relief, against opponents (including the National Center for Law and Policy, a conservative Christian legal defense organization) for whom the practice was intrinsically religious and hence not a permissible part of a public school curriculum (C. G. Brown 2013b).

While the New Age has certainly expanded from the Cambridge séances that William James attended, it nevertheless faces barriers, especially from those Americans most committed to theologically conservative and traditional forms of Christianity. Enduring images of New Age practices as esoteric and antithetical to Christianity are thus a cultural mechanism that reduces its acceptance among conservative Christians. Much of the material and human resources of religious conservatives in low-income neighborhoods, from church basements to volunteers, become less likely to be available to New Age entrepreneurs looking to expand their operations. Moreover, blacks and Hispanics, and less-educated Americans, are more religiously conservative and thus less likely to demand New Age activities. That is, in less-educated and nonwhite neighborhoods, New Age amenities tend to lack both supply (teachers) and demand (students).

Clear empirical implications for the typical locations of New Age amenities thus follow from their historically grounded situation in American culture. New Age amenities should be relatively less numerous and more concentrated than New Con churches, and the overlap between New Age and New Con should be relatively low. Neighborhoods with high numbers of New Age amenities should be less racially diverse, and higher shares of their local populations should be white and have college degrees.

Popular Culture: An American Lingua Franca

The “culture divide” tradition does not come from nowhere, and, as we show below, New Age and New Con correlate with distinct neighborhoods, even if they share some attributes. However, these “divisive” amenities are not the only ones; others may be more commonly shared. But where to look?

One place to start is with popular culture, which almost by definition seeks to appeal to a wide and diverse audience. We have already seen some evidence for this idea. Recall from chapter 3 that amenities like burger joints, fast food, sports and recreation centers, and pizza places are found in most any American zip code.

To be sure, McD’s may not embody one of Wagner’s leading motifs when he wrote of the deep currents of a folk culture transforming a population into das Volk. But we should not turn up our noses, all the same. Pop culture provides a set of shared reference points, watercooler chatter, for many people who may have little else in common, not to mention shared moments and memories of common exuberances, when the home team wins or a song dominates the charts all summer long.

Moreover, pop culture does in fact exemplify one of the deepest currents in American culture—the pragmatist tradition of “whatever works.” At Walmart, you can buy Jesus candles and yoga mats; fast food restaurants have belly-busting triple cheeseburgers, lattes, Tuscan salads, burritos, and sometimes even Korean tacos. This pragmatic tradition of eclectic mixing, discomfort with metaphysical lines in the sand, and pluralistic border crossing is a core American cultural tradition, even if it goes against the search in social theory for a totalizing essence that defines a single and enduring common culture. Big Macs, big boxes, baseball, Bond flicks, and Beyoncé—an American lingua franca.

The empirical implications for a “consensus” proposition testable with our data are clear: pop culture amenities should be numerous, widespread, and found in many different types of residential communities.

Martial Arts as Social Bridges

What else is broadly shared? One candidate comes from political scientist Joseph Yi’s God and Karate on the South Side (2009), which points to Asian-style martial arts clubs. Why martial arts? In an American context, they have become hybrid organizations whose eclectic character appeals to many different groups.

In Asia, their Confucian values are typically associated with a hierarchical, patriarchal past, which young, liberal reformers resist. But in America, in new soil, on a new frontier, they are reborn, reinterpreted as a dynamic tradition open to all, including women and racial minorities. Indeed, in his ethnographic observations of martial arts clubs on Chicago’s South Side, Yi found diverse groups of people, where young black men routinely and voluntarily accepted the authority of black and white women and men of various ages, the children of Jewish professors, and vice versa.

Box 5.14 New Forms of Social Connection

Consumer researchers uncover revealing parallels between the new immigrant populations from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia, and the Italian, Irish, or Polish 1920s communities. . . . Now as then, for instance, ethnic grocers and ethnic media provide tangible ethnic markets. . . . In a Puerto Rican barrio in Philadelphia . . . the “bodeguero” offers customers, along with mainstream products, an ample supply of Hispanic goods such as plantains or vianda. . . .

. . . Hispanic customers marked their ethnicity with special products but at the same time participated in mainstream consumerism. Clients of the Philadelphia bodegas, for instance also shopped in the supermarket for bulk purchases. This simultaneous consumer involvement took place with media as well. . . . My own listening to Spanish language radio confirms this mixture, with Julio Iglesias following Madonna and Spanish-language ads for McDonald’s jostling promotion of specifically Hispanic products.

In the world of consumerism, we see once again deep and variable forms of differentiation. On the one hand, consumers and marketers adapt mass products to particularized circuits. On the other, consumers demand, and marketers create, special ethnic products that nevertheless remain embedded in the national circuit. Increasingly, a new circuit forms in which special products are subsequently incorporated into mainstream consumption as in the case of ethnic shelves in supermarkets or the spread of Mexican restaurants. . . .

The same currency, the same consumer product can have at the same moment universal and local meaning. . . . Why then have so many observers assumed an inescapable tension between diversity and common values? Because looking from the top, they fail to capture the duality of representations, where we find outward uniformity yet diversity in its local adaptation.

— Viviana Zelizer, “Multiple Markets” (1999, 202–6)

Moreover, Asian-style martial arts clubs in America combine high and popular culture. On the basis of on aristocratic Confucian principles, American practitioners are often asked to recite virtues, write essays, or even compose poetry as part of ascending through the belt ranks. At the same time, martial arts are standard fare at the cineplex, from Karate Kid to Enter the Dragon to Kung Fu Panda, and have become a regular part of the curriculum in many park districts, YMCAs, and public schools. Moreover, they promise the excitement associated with stars like Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, together with the opportunity to learn self-defense skills, flying kicks, and how to punch through boards. They appeal both to sophisticated, educated elites (who can of course like a good fight scene as much as anybody else) and to regular Joes and Janes who like to take in the latest action flick on a Friday night.

Box 5.15 Christian Confucians

Because of their outsider, “nonreligious” frame, the martial arts could partner with a wide variety of social groups, including conservative Christians, who are often portrayed as parochial and hostile to foreign cultures. At the 1000 All-Martial Arts Tournament in Pittsburgh, one participant was Kevin (white male, thirty-eight). From his home in nearby McKees Rocks, PA, Kevin has operated the Christian Martial Arts Academy for fifteen years. He received two “associate” degrees from junior colleges, and worked as an avionics foreman at U.S. Airways. . . .

Kevin has been practicing martial arts for about eighteen years, since the age of twenty. “I always wanted to do it. The martial arts movies and the morals and everything were really close to the way I felt. I felt that it was a good thing to start, so that’s what I did.” From his training, Kevin learned “self-discipline, morality, being humble.”

“Respect for others, respect for myself, respect for my life . . . It has actually helped guide my focus through life. I am always learning something new, even now, even as I train by myself. You always learn something. So if you never learn something, you are not trying hard enough.”

— Joseph Yi, God and Karate on the Southside (2009, 136)

Beyond this, while martial arts are not Christian, they are relatively orthogonal to the tensions between biblical Christianity and “holistic” spirituality. A major reason for this is the specific pathway through which many martial arts entered American culture. Whereas the strands of Yoga and other Asian imports that defined the New Age movement came to America through New England literati and college students on a hunt for self-expression beyond Christianity, the martial arts were brought in no small measure through the US military, an institution warmly embraced by heartland evangelicals, black and white (cf. Moskos and Butler 1996). US military bases in East Asia exposed soldiers to the Asian martial arts and helped create the first generation of American practitioners (Krucoff 1999). For instance, Chuck Norris—a conservative Christian—was born in Oklahoma and learned the Korean art of Tang Soo Do when he was stationed at Osan Air Base, South Korea, in 1958. Martial arts are accordingly often perceived less as challenges to traditional Christianity and more as a positive supplement, or at least as neutral.

This “middle position” of martial arts has major implications. They are not typically treated as a part of the stifling, conformist, puritanical culture against which the counterculture rebelled. Despite sometimes involving quasi-mystical cosmic energies (like chi), martial arts in America (in contrast to yoga) are less often associated with strident public debates about theological matters and culture war controversies between religious progressives and conservatives. Nor are the martial arts bound up with the historical racial cleavages that are so deeply intertwined with so many Christian denominations; they are historically associated with neither whites nor nonwhites.

Still, even though martial arts organizations are non-Christian, they are far from lax. They demand discipline, hard work, and dedication. In many schools, after each class, students must chant lists of cardinal virtues, like loyalty to parents and country. It is routine to find teachers asking (younger) students at belt examinations about their report cards and whether they have cleaned their rooms. Yi reports transformational experiences among his informants that read very much like religious conversions to a better, cleaner, more focused way of living, and connects these changes to stronger families, especially among African Americans, and tighter social bonds across traditional ethnic divides—cosmopolitan ethnicity, he calls it.

Martial arts clubs, in other words, cut across numerous cultural themes. To “secular liberals” more inclined toward self-expression and personal authenticity outside of traditional religious organizations, martial arts promise their children an education in social responsibility and personal self-control independent from the Judeo-Christian establishment. And those same virtues speak to cultural conservatives looking for bulwarks of authority and discipline in a society (ostensibly) losing its moral compass. Similarly stressing the potential of the martial arts to establish peaceful relations among potentially opposed groups, social theorist Donald Levine for decades taught a course at the University of Chicago on “conflict theory and aikido,” stressing how in aikido conflictual experience can itself become transmuted into a deeply integrating source of social bonds. These ideas led him to found an international organization, Aiki Extensions, dedicated to the practice of aikido as a force for global peace.

Box 5.16 Martial Arts as Moral Communities

One mother expressed frustration that the public elementary schools did not motivate and challenge their students, like her son Christian (black male).

Chris really loves Tang Soo Do (TSD). He keeps all the old belts and broken boards at home. I think TSD really builds character. I see a lot more discipline in Chris. If he doesn’t do something I want I just tell him, “Don’t you want to go to TSD?” and he would do it right away. Chris likes TSD so much that he would go to class five times a week. He would spend more time on TSD than school! . . . There is a clear path of advancement that you see, white belt, yellow, and so forth. During testing, all the parents and friends come out. . . .

Why don’t kids get similar excitement when they go up grade-level in school? Why don’t kids get excited over school? . . . I wish we could transfer the qualities of martial arts school to our schools.

— Joseph Yi, God and Karate on the Southside (2009, 118)

If martial arts do bridge diverse aspects of American social and cultural life, they should evince a broad appeal that manifests in clubs across all types of neighborhoods and differs from the relative narrowness of New Age amenities. Hence some empirical generalizations should follow: martial arts clubs should be more strongly correlated with New Age amenities and New Con churches than each is with the other; martial arts clubs should be located in racially diverse and educated neighborhoods; martial arts should be more strongly correlated with popular culture amenities than should New Age amenities.

Where Are God, Yoga, and Karate?

Our amenities database provides a unique opportunity to investigate these hypotheses. The main variables of interest come from the yellow pages database. Martial arts clubs are included there as “martial arts instruction.” Our New Age index sums yoga studios, meditation centers, and metaphysical bookstores, and our Pop Culture index sums six items: fast food restaurants, sports bars, music stores, movie theaters, sports and recreation facilities, and warehouse stores and superstores.37

To measure New Con churches, we summed for every US zip code the total number of 10 different types of churches: Pentecostal, Nondenominational, Bible, Apostolic, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Full Gospel, Seventh-day Adventist, Church of God, and Church of the Nazarene. The 10 types are also the only homogeneously conservative listings in the yellow pages database; by contrast, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian include both conservative (evangelical) and more liberal (mainline) strains.38

To illustrate the different locations of these types of amenities, we begin from descriptive statistics and work up to multivariate analyses. We first compare the total number and national distributions of the four types—New Con, New Age, Pop Culture, and Martial Arts—as well as their regional distributions and intercorrelations with one another. We then join these four indexes with census data to examine the demographic characteristics of the zip codes in which they are most numerous. National bivariate correlations between the indexes and racial diversity follow. Finally, we estimate multiple regression models to give a multivariate account of the different qualities that characterize zip codes in which New Con, New Age, Martial Arts, and Pop Culture organizations are typically located.

Pop Culture, New Con, and Martial Arts Are More Widespread than New Age Amenities

First consider some simple descriptive statistics, as in table 5.1. Table 5.1 shows the national total, mean, and kurtosis for New Con, Pop Culture, New Age, and Martial Arts.

Table 5.1. New Con and Pop Culture are the most numerous and broadly distributed organizations; New Age has the fewest organizations and most concentrated distribution
	Sum	Mean	Kurtosis
New Age	5,037	0.1	111
New Con	91,071	2.2	26
Martial Arts	16,343	0.4	31
Pop Culture	164,646	3.9	22
Note: This table shows the national sum, mean, and kurtosis for the New Con, Pop Culture, New Age, and Martial Arts indexes. The New Con index sums Pentecostal, Nondenominational, Bible, Apostolic, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Full Gospel, Seventh-day Adventist, Church of God, and the Church of the Nazarene. The New Age index sums yoga studios, meditation centers, and metaphysical bookstores. The Pop Culture index includes music stores, sports bars, fast food restaurants, movie theaters, sports and recreation facilities, and warehouse superstores.

The picture is largely in line with our expectations. New Con and Pop Culture organizations are the most numerous, with about 4 Pop Culture and 2 New Con listings per zip code, and Pop Culture has the flattest national distribution. New Age amenities are the least numerous and most concentrated (highest kurtosis). Martial arts clubs are far more evenly and widely distributed around the country. In general, “God” and “Karate” seem to have a broader presence nationally than New Age, with popular culture (as expected) showing the broadest reach.

Looking at regional distributions helps to further examine where these organizations are typically located, as in figure 5.8. Figure 5.8 shows the average number of yellow pages listings per zip code for the four indexes in each major US region: the South, West, Midwest, and Northeast. Pop Culture is highest in the West and lowest in the Midwest. New Con is highest in the South and lowest in the Northeast. Martial Arts and New Age are both highest in the West and Northeast, consistent with their status as “imports” into the more cosmopolitan coastal regions, though Martial arts clubs have a stronger presence than New Age amenities in the Midwest and South.

Figure 5.8

This figure shows the average number of New Con, New Age, Pop Culture, and Martial Arts amenities per zip code across each major US region, as defined according to US census specifications.

It is also worth noting that many of the highest-scoring individual zip codes fit our expectations about the location and reach of these types of organizations. The top New Con zip codes are mostly in the South (e.g., Memphis; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Fort Lauderdale) and in predominantly African American and Hispanic areas of big cities (e.g., Chicago’s Cottage Grove Heights, South Central Los Angeles, South Dallas); the top zip codes for New Age amenities include college towns (Boulder, Ann Arbor) and “hippie enclaves” (Santa Fe), as well as some hip metropolitan neighborhoods (e.g., Lincoln Park, Chicago; Chelsea, New York). The top Martial Arts zip codes include Chelsea and Boulder, but also downtown Atlanta (72 percent black), Honolulu (mostly Asian), and Rancho Cucamonga (outside Los Angeles, mostly white but increasingly Asian and Hispanic). The top three zip codes for Pop Culture span downtown Atlanta, Manhattan, and Branson, Missouri (home of Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede).

These different distributions suggest that these types of amenities are differentially correlated with one another. Table 5.2 shows that this is indeed the case. The correlations in table 5.2 broadly fit our expectations. All the amenity types are positively correlated with one another—even these diverse amenity types are in general often located near one another. Yet the strengths of these correlations vary. Pop Culture and Martial Arts have the highest average correlation with the other organizational types. New Age and New Con have the lowest correlation of any two types, but they are not negatively correlated; the divide is not absolute. All in all, New Age appears to have the lowest spatial overlap (among these organizations) with American popular culture, while Martial Arts and Pop Culture are the most likely to be present in places with both New Con and New Age.

Table 5.2. Intercorrelations of New Age, New Con, Martial Arts, and Pop Culture

Note: This table shows Pearson correlations of New Con, New Age, Pop Culture, and Martial Arts with one another. N is all US zip codes. Darker shades indicate higher values.

Next, we examine the typical racial compositions of zip codes across the United States with many of these local organizations. We measure racial diversity as a racial entropy variable. We calculate racial entropy for 2000 and 1990 census data, and analyze both 1990 diversity and the difference between 1990 and 2000. Racial entropy ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 represents complete racial homogeneity, with the entire zip code population of a single race, and 1 represents maximal diversity, with a perfectly even distribution of individuals across the various census race categories.

Table 5.3 shows the correlations of each type of amenity with racial diversity. The main point is that racial diversity rises with all four types of amenities, although substantially less for New Age amenities.39 New Con churches and Pop Culture are most strongly associated with racial diversity. Martial Arts is in the middle.40

Table 5.3. Correlations of racial diversity with New Con, Pop Culture, Martial Arts, and New Age

Note: This table shows Pearson correlations of seven types of organizations with racial diversity (1990) and change in racial diversity (1990–2000). N is all US zip codes. Darker shades indicate higher values.

Finally, we can get a broader and more nuanced portrait of the types of areas in which these amenities are located by examining more variables. Figure 5.9 shows that there are some broad similarities in where all four of these amenities are typically found: in zip codes with more cultural employment clusters, in bigger counties, and where crime rates and job growth are relatively high. Yet New Con and New Age again stand out. New Con is the only one of the four more likely to be where college graduates are relatively rare and grew by relatively small amounts in the 1990s. New Age amenities, on the other hand, are the only ones higher in Democratic than Republican counties and in zip codes with lower increases in the nonwhite share of the population. At the same time, New Age amenities are the most strongly associated with college graduates, both in their levels and increases. Martial Arts and Pop Culture by contrast are associated both with college graduates and with relatively fast growth in nonwhite residents.

Figure 5.9

This figure shows characteristics of zip codes in which New Con, New Age, Martial Arts, and Pop Culture amenities are most likely to be found. Bubble sizes are proportional to coefficients from negative binomial regression models. These types of models are appropriate when the outcome is a count. All variables were standardized to have mean equal 0 and standard deviations equal 1. N is all US zip codes.

These results illustrate distinct cultural patterns in contemporary America. They show that the sense of a culturally divided nation does not come from nowhere. Religiously conservative New Con churches tend to be in heavily nonwhite neighborhoods with few college graduates; religiously progressive New Age amenities tend to be in comparatively less racially diverse and more educated neighborhoods.41 These disparities grew through the 1990s, and analysis of 2010 data indicates that they continued to widen (see Yi and Silver [2015] for these more recent results). At the same time, the spatial distribution of Pop Culture and Martial Arts highlights potential bridges for this and other societal divides.

To be sure, these results offer insight into a specific snapshot in time, and the new century may offer new possibilities. If New Con and New Age devotees overcome negative stereotypes and animosities, they may extend their reach further to diverse races, classes, and sensibilities. Many practitioners, in fact, work fervently to reach all corners of American society. Yi has pointed to the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, a student evangelical organization, that boasts more than 700 college chapters and 34,870 student members. ICF generally eschews culture war issues, such as same-sex marriage, and promotes an active program of multiracial, social justice work that unites religious conservatives and progressives alike (Yi, forthcoming). Concurrently, many yoga practitioners reach out to racially diverse, economically disadvantaged populations. In New York City, the staff and volunteers of Bent On Learning, a nonprofit organization, teach yoga to 3,300 school children every week; other groups bring yoga to prison inmates (Schware 2012; Hill 2010; Landau and Gross 2008).

We should not forget a key point from chapter 3. Many neighborhoods may share a single amenity but have overall scenes that differ in many other ways. We saw this in detail with the example of body art and piercing studios in chapter 3. The specific amenities we have focused on here—martial arts, popular culture, evangelical churches, New Age—likely operate in tandem with many other amenities and variables to contribute to scenes that are welcoming or unwelcoming to different groups and individuals.

Indeed, many congregations have integrated into their services elements from popular culture, especially where they are clearly competing with other churches and leisure activities. For instance, the widespread use of popular songs and talented performers, the rousing political engagement of some ministers, the wide range of cultural, political, and social activities which are joined inside the new megachurches, the openness to using new forms of media to reach out to new audiences—these are all frequently pointed to as features of the more aggressively growth-oriented Pentecostalism.

Evangelical churches are not alone in desiring to connect to a wider scene. Some Episcopal churches have women ministers and openly appeal to LGBTQ parishioners. The Church of England divided in its debates over related lifestyle and identity issues among its leadership as they sought to respond to the more activist evangelicals. Similarly, when the pope went to Brazil in 2013 he encouraged citizens to raise their street demonstrations against the national government to even higher levels. These activist efforts by the Church of England and the pope reflect the challenges faced by traditional religious organizations at the end of the twentieth century as they compete with multiple sacred and secular alternatives, and the desire to reenergize traditional practices by connecting to contemporary scenes.

But, without probing the precise historical specifics, the bigger point is that religion for many persons from Tanzania to Thailand to the South Side of Chicago is part of a broader suite of lifestyle issues. That is, churches are often elements of a scene. The question in choosing which church to attend is in this way not only about primordial identity reenactment—following the path of one’s grandparents—but also an articulation of one’s own path and the qualities and experiences one hopes to find along it. And this is not just an issue for young, highly educated professionals. Brazil and some African countries have seen some of the most massive growth of Pentecostal memberships especially among their most marginalized citizens, just as many Mexican Americans make the personal conversion from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity, along with accompanying changes in lifestyle and taste. Similarly the proportion of American Jews who marry Gentiles has reached over 50 percent in recent surveys (Putnam and Campbell 2010, 156). Other paths, as we have stressed, lead many outside the church to the dojo or the yoga studio, raising new questions about how these practices (and their practitioners) can or cannot be integrated into the typical scenes of Christian America.

This is not a conflict-free world. But it is one where the lines of division and commonality are drawn in multiplex and potentially new ways. The scenes approach sensitizes us to the wide array of overlapping elements that shift where and how people choose to live near one another. If one only looks at data on race and income, for instance, they seem to “explain” neighborhood differences and have sparked much public debate.42 But if one looks further, the story changes. Rich and poor; black, white, and brown; Catholic, mainline, evangelical, and Jew; secular and spiritual; young, middle-aged, and old; more-educated and less-educated; liberals and conservatives; men and women; square and cool; self-expressive, glamorous, transgressive, corporate, formal, traditional, and neighborly—these and more constitute a crosscutting matrix in which individuals can find much they share and much they do not, myriad opportunities for combination and recombination, bridges and boundaries, but no single ultimate cleavage that determines all the rest across all contexts “in the final analysis.” This is a more variegated and pluralistic picture of American society than the typical blacks and whites of dueling tribes. This is an America in which conflict and cooperation, bonding and bridging, definition and redefinition, joining and separating, are occurring all the time, constituting diverse community structures that are both durable and dynamic.

While this chapter has focused on scenes and residential communities, behind many of these discussions are questions of politics. For many observers, these differences—not only in scenes, but also in religion, education, class, race, and all the rest—really only matter to the extent that they translate into differences in the voting booth or at the rally. This, of course, is why Bishop’s The Big Sort created such a stir. That Americans are apparently sorting themselves into lifestyle communities may be interesting intellectually, but it matters to politicians and political junkies because these communities supposedly make a difference in electoral and movement politics.

But do they? And if so, how do these lifestyle communities compare to other variables like religion, class, and race? That is the topic of our next chapter.