The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

Over the past decade or so, the astute journalist Alan Ehrenhalt has been walking, looking, and asking questions in many of America’s metropolitan areas—trying, in the manner of Jane Jacobs, to see afresh, without preconceptions. It’s been a very productive venture for the former editor of Governing magazine.

Ehrenhalt discovered that “a radical rearrangement” is under way. People possessing money and choice “were increasingly living in the center, while newcomers and the poor were settling often in the suburbs ....” These shifts amount, he says, to a “great inversion.” Chris Leinberger of Brookings Institution has offered a similar assessment, but Ehrenhalt’s chronicle is particularly illuminating, drawing as it does from visits to a widely dispersed metro areas, including Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Chicago, Denver, and Phoenix.

“Between 2000 and 2010, Chicago became a whiter city with a larger affluent population,” Ehrenhalt reports. The residential population of the Chicago’s central area—a district five miles long from north to south and about one mile wide, from Lake Michigan westward—jumped by 48 percent from 2000 to 2007 and is projected to grow another 39 percent, to 230,000, by 2020.

More than 12,000 condominium and luxury apartment units were built or retrofitted in the last decade in Center City Philadelphia, estimated to have a residential population of 92,000. Observes Ehrenhalt: “[I]t is a place where increasing numbers of affluent people want to live.”

Pro-city sensibility

Individuals in their twenties (and in some cases older), with considerable education, have been shifting their preferences. Says Ehrenhalt: “[The young newcomers who have rejuvenated Fourteenth and U streets in Washington are nearly all convinced that this recovering slum is the sort of place where they want to spend time, and, increasingly where they want to live. ... it is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this cohort, particularly among its elite.”

All over the South and Southwest, he says, the leaders of what had been “sprawl-based conurbations ... began to express deep longing for a downtown,” a center like those they’d seen in older cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. “They spent billions of public dollars on light-rail transit systems; they drafted long-term ‘vision’ documents that projected a future in which downtowns were friendly to pedestrians rather than just convenient for the automobile.”

A survey of Houston area residents indicates that 40 percent of them want “a smaller home in a more urbanized area, within walking distance of shops and workplaces.” Thirty miles of light-rail transit with 65 new stations are scheduled for completion in Houston between 2013 and 2015. David Crossley, leader of a group called Houston Tomorrow, is quoted saying: “There will be more transit-oriented real estate in Houston opening all at once than anywhere in the country.”

Lower incomes exit

This change of direction doesn’t mean that suburban growth will halt, or that everyone with a hunger for lively, active, walkable places will go to the region’s center. Lower-income people are moving outward. Immigrants stopped settling mostly in cities by 1980, and their suburban orientation has grown stronger with time. “In 2005, it is estimated, 4.4 million immigrants went to suburbs and 2.8 million to cities,” he says.

“In most successful large cities, it is simply no financial bargain for newcomers to live downtown anymore,” he points out. “Most of the jobs they seek are in the suburbs anyway.”
What’s important to keep in mind is that many suburbs want to have their own dynamic, mixed-use centers—and they’re getting them.

At The Woodlands — an expansive, outlying Houston area community conceived in the 1960s and 1970s as an antidote to big-city life — asphalt parking lots in the center are gradually being converted to a gridded street plan. Many of Houston’s suburban centers are trying to foster an urban atmosphere.

Ehrenhalt is insightful on why some cities have fared better than others. In Chicago, an extensive rail system has helped neighborhoods like Wicker Park and Bucktown to boom. “In Chicago,” one source tells Ehrenhalt, “gentrification follows the El.” Also, the razing of failed public housing towers allowed middle-class people to buy or rent homes in areas they previously would have considered too scary.

In Philadelphia, by contrast, it’s been hard for the forces of reinvestment and repopulation to push outward from Center City. Neighborhoods not far from Center City amount to “a partially abandoned no-man’s-land”—too daunting for middle-class folks to move into and fix up, he suggests. Center City, he says, “might as well have a medieval moat around large parts of it.”

Impediments to city living

A virtue of The Great Inversion is its willingness to explore impediments often left unexplored by new urbanists. Ehrenhalt believes that the tax structure is holding Philadelphia back. Philly has always been a city of small rowhouse owners who are averse to paying substantial property taxes, he says.

Therefore Philadelphia has relied heavily on a hefty wage tax; residents who work in the city pay nearly 4 percent of their earned income to the city, and nonresidents working in the city pay about 3.5 percent—“a flat-out incentive for employers to move outside the city.”

Ehrenhalt doesn’t stop there. He makes the case that Philadelphia’s politics is imbued with parochialism, and that this is “merely one more reflection of the widely felt parochialism of its culture, the native orneriness that not only sets races and classes against one another, but casts seemingly similar communities as rivals rather than cooperating entities.” He quotes Alan Greenberger, the city’s economic development commissioner, as saying, “Being aggravated and contentious is part of who we are.”

Some Philadelphians will take umbrage at that. But Ehrenhalt’s views always have some basis that makes them worth considering. The book’s greatest vulnerability is its title. There are many limits to the urban-suburban inversion, varying from one region to another. A careful reader may come away wondering whether it’s an exaggeration to claim that American cities are going to have a European pattern: affluent people in the core, poor people on the outskirts. The situation seems more complicated than that.

All in all, though, The Great Inversion is book that every urbanist should read. It is a serious, provocative, and gracefully written, and consistently interesting look at how the urban-suburban balance is shifting.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 288 pp., $26.95 hardcover