They are young, bearded, booted,
and armed with i-Pods and diplomas.
And they are coming to a city near you:
They are the millennials. The causes
of this new reality and a readable and engaging analysis of urban America’s
changing make-up can be found in Ehrenhalt’s excellent new book. While “gentrification” is already forty years
old and freighted with assumptions, Ehrenhalt prefers to label what is
happening to America’s cities as “demographic inversion.” The hip, young, white upper-middle class is
moving in and the working class and minorities are relocating outside cities. “The late twentieth century was the age of
poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs,” Ehrenhalt writes, ”The twenty first
century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants
settling on the outside.”
Ehrenhalt places America’s urban centers in
their modern context by guiding the reader through the history of nineteenth
century European cities and their contemporary parallels. In fascinating cases studies of cities and their
inner suburbs--from New York to Phoenix--Ehrenhalt provides amazing
insight. For example, he details how
immigrants are now bypassing cities and blowing life into hollowed out
post-industrial areas. The proximity of
public transportation, an international airport, and cheap housing units were a
recipe for economic boom in some areas while, in Philadelphia, no airport and a
hostility to immigration has left the city stuck in stasis.
He
wonderfully summarizes the flops and successes of urban centers and
interestingly details the problems of planning and the mess wrought by
free-market sprawl. Today, for obvious
reasons of cost and convenience, more younger people hope to live an urban
lifestyle rather than “car dependent suburbia.”
But his study of urban life is not lifelessly analytical. In one intriguing study Ehrenhalt describes
the unique efforts of Texas State Representative Garnet Coleman who, rather
than wish fair wind to demographic inversion, is furiously purchasing up
inner-city real estate in an effort to slow or delay the move of his
African-American constituents.
Perhaps the
necessary successor to this book will be an evaluation of how the new
generation of urban dwellers will reshape politics. Already, as evidenced in books like Bowling Alone, participation in civic
affairs within cities is dwindling. How
will the reverse flow of America’s population transform America’s political
scene? With 82% of Americans living in
cities and suburbs, the upcoming election will be a forecast of what is to
come.
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