![]() ![]() The early signs from policy-makers are not promising. Whether suburbs in general will become more accessible to nondrivers-be they poor, elderly, immigrants, or the disabled-is shaped by policies at the national, state, and local level. ![]() The answer to these questions and others will depend largely on public policy choices. Unwalkable suburbs professional#What do the changes mean for the poor, who are being pushed out of cities? Will they be consigned to peripheral areas from which they cannot access professional and educational opportunities without spending increasingly unaffordable sums on gasoline? And will the diversity of urban neighborhoods, always a draw for liberal yuppies, erode over time as more and more of them move into the same areas? This inversion raises a number of questions. Previously homogeneous communities have become increasingly multicultural, a development that has been welcomed by some in white suburbia and resented by others. As for the new suburbanites, their migration also represents a historic shift-and a potentially disruptive one. They are moving directly into brand new apartment buildings in central business districts. What exactly is different between the gentrification of a generation ago and today’s changes? Now the protean stages are sometimes skipped entirely-the bankers and other professionals aren’t waiting around for artists to walk point for them. “The roles of cities and suburbs will not only change but will very nearly reverse themselves,” he predicts, in about 20 years’ time. ![]() In fact, the United States, with the poor in cities and the wealthy in suburbs, has largely been a global exception. Major cities in developing countries, such as Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, already fit this mold. Ehrenhalt argues that this constitutes a return to form for the modern metropolis, pointing to nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna as cities that invented the template. Our metropolitan areas, he argues in The Great Inversion, are being turned inside out, with the wealthier white people living in the cities, while those who aspire to be the first generation in their family to achieve the American Dream-frequently immigrants and African Americans-move to the suburbs. Many are seeking the same virtues-space, good schools, low crime-that drove whites to suburbs throughout the twentieth century.Īlan Ehrenhalt’s new book ties these threads into one common phenomenon that he calls demographic inversion. Some are following job opportunities that have been dispersed around the urban perimeter. Immigrants and minorities, from the working poor to the affluent, are arriving in suburbia. Maybe it’s the Vietnamese nail salons and pho joints that have filled up the old suburban strip malls, or the sudden emergence of Latino pedestrians walking home along busy roads or congregating in convenience store parking lots. If you live in the suburbs, you may have noticed a totally different demographic trend: the diversifying of suburbia. ![]() The changes are also occurring beyond city limits. Cities from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Houston, Texas, are seeing, and helping, young professionals reinvent their downtowns. And it isn’t just happening in the handful of artistic and cultural meccas like New York and San Francisco. New residential buildings are going up in office-only areas that not so long ago turned into ghost towns at night. But this is not just the same old gentrification story, going back to the 1970s, of low-income urban neighborhoods with attractive building stock being discovered by artists and, after them, white-collar professionals. If you live in a metropolitan area that has adapted well to the post-industrial economy, you have almost certainly noticed a few changes in recent years: high-rise luxury apartment buildings going up downtown, abandoned factories being converted into live/work loft spaces, decayed urban neighborhoods becoming overrun with yuppies. The Great Inversion: And The Future of the American City By Alan Ehrenhalt ![]()
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