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Trading Places: The Demographic Inversion of the American City
by possibly noteworthy at 7:15 am EDT, Aug 1, 2008 |
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so. Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us. Atlanta, for example, is shifting from an overwhelmingly black to what is likely to soon be a minority-black city. This is happening in part because the white middle class is moving inside the city borders, but more so because blacks are moving out. Between 1990 and 2006, according to research by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, the white population of Atlanta has increased from roughly 30 percent to 35 percent while the black population has declined from 67 percent to 55 percent. In this decade alone, two of Atlanta's huge suburban counties, Clayton and DeKalb, have acquired substantial black majorities, and immigrants arriving from foreign countries are settling primarily there or in similar outlying areas, not within the city itself. The numbers for Washington, D.C. are similar.
So ... Atlanta's still just as hosed as Munich, right? The Economist ran a story on this back in February: Victorville has no traditionally white areas because it has no traditional areas of any kind. At the moment, one of the engines that has driven this migration is stalling. Victorville and Apple Valley are mired in a housing crisis: San Bernardino county had 22,000 foreclosures last year, compared with 7,800 in 1996. Fewer people are moving as house prices fall. Yet this seems to have slowed, not stopped, the black exodus from Los Angeles.
The pull of the suburbs is strong.
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RE: Trading Places: The Demographic Inversion of the American City
by Decius at 9:18 am EDT, Mar 9, 2009 |
possibly noteworthy wrote:
In this decade alone, two of Atlanta's huge suburban counties, Clayton and DeKalb, have acquired substantial black majorities, and immigrants arriving from foreign countries are settling primarily there or in similar outlying areas, not within the city itself.
Reading back over this, one wonders to what degree its an oversimplification made by someone who doesn't actually understand how this city is laid out. I mean, generally speaking I think that there is some gentrification of downtown Atlanta that has been going on, but you can't rely on data about counties to understand the relationship between urban and suburban here because thats not how the counties are laid out. It seems like thats what they are doing - are they presuming that the demographic data for Fulton reflects "the city itself?" In fact, the "city," which I think of as the area inside the perimeter, is split 55 - 40 between Dekalb and Fulton with the other 5 percent going to Clayton. Fulton includes huge suburban areas southeast and north of the city, including well to do Sandy Springs where houses on quarter acre lots go for $500,000.* DeKalb has lots of immigrants because there used to be (1970) a huge industrial area along Peachtree Industrial Blvd. with numerous factories. They have been shutting those factories down, which caused property values in the area to collapse, Detroit style. Except Atlanta is not Detriot, and a huge, diverse immigrant community swept in to take advantage of the cheap rents. Its like if you took all of the immigrant clusters in NYC, shook them up, and placed them in a single neighborhood. Referring to this place as an "outlying area" and an example of demographic inversion is simply misleading. Today the area is starting to gentrify a bit. They renamed part of "Peachtree Industrial Blvd" to just plain "Peachtree Blvd." One of the last big factories, a GM plant, closed in September. Not a reaction to the crisis - this had been announced for years. There were plans on the table to level it and install a new urbanist shopping/living/working type setup. I suspect those plans are on hold given the economic crisis. Same thing with developments downtown. Apparently 66 new condos were sold during the second half of 08 and they recently auctioned off a bunch of nice downtown condos at half their original asking prices. Whatever demographic inversion was going on has absolutely ground to a halt and in my view there is way too much high end housing coming on the market. There are numerous buildings in construction around the city that feature million dollar condos - a Ritz Carlton residence in Buckhead, a Trump Tower, and 1010 Midtown where most of the units are around $600,000. I honestly think this represents some sort of spreadsheet fantasy where the numbers look better if you assume all the customers are rich. The actual market is looking for something completely differ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ] |
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