The Urban World, 9 th Ed.

The Urban World, 9th Ed. J. John Palen

Chapter 11: Cities and Change • Introduction • The Urban Crisis: Thesis • Urban Revival: Antithesis • A Political Economy Look at the Urban Crisis • 21st-Century City Developments • Gentrification • Decline of Middle-Income Neighborhoods • Successful Working Class Revival • Summary

Introduction • There is confusion and dispute about the future of the city • It is a cliché that we live in an age of urban crisis • Certainly there is no lack of prophets to passionately catalog urban ills

The Urban Crisis: Thesis • The last decades of the 20th century heard voices raised everywhere proclaiming the inevitable decline, if not death, of the city • Are these pessimistic predictions accurate? • Loss of manufacturing jobs • Growing need for services while revenues decreased • Aging city properties and municipalities

Urban Revival: Antithesis • The last two decades have witnessed a rebirth of hope • An urban renaissance has taken place • The recession and housing bust kept people from moving to the suburbs • In 2010, many cities posted their highest growth rates in a decade

A Political Economy Look at the Urban Crisis • Political economy academics hold that city problems do not occur in a vacuum, and city problems cannot be examined separately from the political, historical, and, particularly, economic systems of which they are a part • The quest for ever-greater profits by large monopolistic corporations is seen s leading to government policies • Gentrification is seen as a conscious product of land-based interest groups able to control the real estate market

21st-Century City Developments • New Patterns • The economic and social health of cities shows a mixed pattern • During the 21st century, it seems clear, not all cities are going to experience similar situations • The urban renaissance is uneven, but clearly more prevalent than a decade ago

Central Business Districts • The Central Business District (CBD) is the economic heart of the city • Generally have been reasonably successful in retaining business and government offices • Downtown buildings use space effectively • Cities are actively promoting downtown convention centers as an economic growth strategy • Downtown stores will never again have the unchallenged control of retail trade they exhibited during the centralizing era of the streetcar and subway

Mismatch Hypothesis • Central-city offices provide new jobs—but only for those possessing specific white-collar skills • City factories and manufacturing plants continue to move to the suburbs—or, more frequently, abroad • The so-called “mismatch hypothesis” is that cities have blue-collar job seekers and white-collar job opportunities • Downtown Housing • In the last decade downtown population in major U.S. cities increased about 10 percent • The most successful North American city in bringing residents downtown is Vancouver • There is a need for balance of people and business

Fiscal Health • Today municipalities are largely left to sink or swim on their own • Without federal help cities have substantially abandoned their earlier programs to fight poverty and solve social problems • Of every dollar of taxes, 65 cents go to the federal government, 20 cents go to the states, and only the remaining 14 cents go to the local governments • Crumbling Infrastructure • The most severe problem is often antiquated water and sewage systems • 80,000 acres of lad are polluted with toxic chemicals and deserted

Neighborhood Revival • There is now a clear movement, especially by young professionals, toward residence in the central city • The gentrification movement is taking place in older neighborhoods that are recycling from a period of decay • The last decade has seen the rapid expansion of gentrification with cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco

Gentrification • Government and Revitalization • In the postwar years the federal government sponsored urban clearance and renewal • By contrast, until recently urban gentrification has been funded almost entirely by the private sector • Today, municipal governments overwhelmingly support gentrification, largely because it brings more affluent taxpayers • Who is Gentrifying? • Gentrifiers are perhaps better described as “urban stayers” than as “urban in-movers” • Generally young or middle-aged adults, childless, white, urban-bred, well-educated, etc.

Why is Gentrification Taking Place? • Demographic Changes • Decline in marriage, later age at marriage, increases in unmarried couples, and declines in the umber of young children per family • All factors represent a decline of the sort of “familism” that played such an important part in the postwar flight to the suburbs • Economic Changes • Commuting and utilities are expensive • Revitalizing existing city housing can be less expensive than new construction on the suburban periphery

Lifestyle Choices • Urban living is “in” • A serious liability of many central-city neighborhoods—the low quality of city schools—does not weigh as heavily on urbanites without children • Older restored houses are now considered more desirable • Displacement of the Poor • Those displaced are most often low-income renters, and low-income renters as a group have high residential mobility • Elderly property owners do face higher property assessments, but higher assessments mean that their property is sharply appreciating in value

Decline of Middle-Income Neighborhoods • The number of middle-income neighborhoods is shrinking • U.S. middle-income neighborhoods made up six out of ten of all metro neighborhoods in 1970, they made up only four out of ten in 2000 • Rising income inequality has led to rising income segregation • Neighborhoods are becoming more and more economically homogenous

Successful Working-Class Revival • Is it possible for cities to provide decent housing for low-income working-class residents? • Working with community groups and local nonprofit housing corporations, the city of New York, for example, has worked a quiet revolution, building just during the early 1990s some 50,000 new residences in what had been the most devastated areas of the city

The Urban World, 9 th Ed.