I unabashedly prefer living in the suburbs over cities. But I'm glad the "Urban Revival" happened, and I hope it continues.
In my own city, the rising home values have made it economically viable to pour money into formerly decaying row houses that were built for working class families over a century ago. So at least a lot of the ancient, unsafe wiring, plumbing, lead paint, asbestos, etc., is being dealt with by people who can afford to foot the bill.
Hasn't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of those tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than sooner), and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with the space/schooling issues of the city.
Edit:
Richard Florida is a very famous urbanist, but take his predictions with a grain of salt. He has been wrong before, self-admittedly so (https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richa...). The descriptive aspects of this article might be right (the urban rush is slowing or reversing, for certain reasons), but his prescriptive descriptions- maybe less so.
>Hasn't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of those tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than sooner), and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with the space/schooling issues of the city.
Only this doesn't make any more sense now than it did sense.
People are born every year, not in spurts.
Thus the flux of "tech yupsters" coming into SF should be as constant as those getting married and going to the suburbs -- keeping the state steady.
If that isn't the case, it's not because "those tech yupsters eventually started family" (which every generation does at some point anyway), but because the influx of young tech people to SF had peaked at some point in the past.
Tangentially related, but I am really disappointed in how little actual renewal the "revival" brought about. Except in extremely concentrated urban cores like in Manhattan almost every city is still by far dominated by 20s style row houses that stalled out the renewal process (because the yuppies that were moving into cores had no interest in those).
Gentrification and renewal came to blows right in the middle and left what was probably the greatest blemish on the urban unchanged... because those were where the actual poverty was all along in the first place. The urban cores that got "renewed" were never squalor and dilapidation - they might not have been as trendy, but city centers have too much general access to be that useless no matter the popular trends. Unless you have a city like Detroit they just cannot degrade that much.
Which really means all this hype about renewal is really just vapid air. Nobody is putting big money into actually innovating on the city concept, its all about buying politicians for favorable zoning over actually making anything lasting and meaningful out of the interest in urban renewal.
Is it possible that the "urban renewal" just didn't hit already-popular and not-in-need-of-renewal cities like Manhattan?
My city was almost completely dead as recently as the 90s. Very high crime, lots of abandoned buildings, no businesses in the city center, only poor people lived downtown. Today there is a brewery on every corner, food trucks parked outside every day, live music almost every night of the week, and tons of people who don't own cars making it because downtown is an amazing place to be.
And you talk about Detroit: Detroit was one of the biggest benefactors of the urban renewal. Sure it's not back to its pre-1968 glory days, but downtown is a safe and entertaining place to be, plenty of young people hang out, Woodward Ave in particular is hopping pretty much every night of the week. It went from being the place you warned your kids about to being the place you take your kids for a weekend while you watch a baseball game.
It's easy to look at Manhattan and say "so much for urban renewal", but look at smaller cities in the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St Louis. All cities that just 20 years ago were a death trap if you were there after dark, and certainly not a place you want to live. Now it's hard to tell their downtown cores were ever abandoned in the first place.
I was at an event at the San Jose Convention Center for the first time in ages fairly recently. San Jose has gained its share of trendy restaurants, etc. But I was surprised the degree to which much of the downtown core is still relatively squalid.
Some parts of downtown SJ are fairly nice now but once you get past the light rail tracks around 1st St it gets pretty sketchy, especially after business hours.
A lot of the urban renewal I see is very concentrated. I recently was talking about this in a different context. A lot of Northeast port and manufacturing towns have indeed reinvigorated an area with nice condos, restaurants, chichi shops, cafes, etc. But, in many cases, it's an area you can walk across in 5 to 10 minutes and most of the area beyond is still rundown.
It's a work in progress, unlike what the article says. In my city, we revitalized downtown, then the east side of town, now they're working on the northwest side of town. As the city becomes more popular, more businesses and people want to move in but now property values are higher and vacant buildings are less common, so you have to move further from the city center. It starts at the center and works its way outward.
>> Detroit was one of the biggest benefactors of the urban renewal...
according to the stats- population wise they went from ~1 mil in 2009 to under 700k in 2016.
there are a couple of decent 1x1 mile enclaves there - midtown, greektown and nearby sports arenas other than that it sucks.
>> Cleveland
much nicer than it used to be overall but plenty of areas where you have to watch your back. also, while not as drastic as Detroit, population figures are declining as well.
Milwaukee is marginally better than it used to be but barely a poster child for "urban renewal".
Why do so many people hear "urban renewal" and think it has to impact 100% of every city equally at the same time? That's like judging a town of 500,000 people saying "yeah but NYC is so much more massive, so your town is useless because the population isn't as big".
Can we not just agree that Detroit (et al) are better off than they were 20 years ago and that this is a good thing overall? You can nitpick "yeah but it's still not the greatest city in the world" all you want, but you might find that no one else gives a fuck about your definition. Progress is progress no matter how you want to redefine it.
>much nicer than it used to be
That's quite literally all I'm saying. That's the very definition of "urban renewal". Better than it used to be.
>> Progress is progress no matter how you want to redefine it.
but them numbers don't lie either :)
if some city has it's population go down by 30% I don't think this qualifies as "renewal" even if a couple of areas has gotten better within that same timeframe.
gentrification - as in very targeted/high density (in some cases literally a few blocks type deal) move of young-ish professionals into formerly dilapidated areas - it does exist no doubt and in some (very few) cases - like LES in Manhattan - can be a pre-cursor to a more global "renewal". But these types of cases are few and far in between.
I guess my point is there hasn't been a significant urban renewal to speak of lately, the kind that can be "over" because it has to kick in first before that can happen.
Is the goal purely population based? You seem to be making the claim that a city is only worth its raw population numbers, which I tried to refute. Detroit used to be a dead city full of slums and ghettos with a population of 1+ million people. Today it's a city with a thriving downtown that's on the economic upswing with 700,000 people. Even if "economic upswing" means people finally have enough money to move to another city. That's still better than it was. Still better than Flint, where they can't.
Think of it this way: if I refactor my app so it runs faster and hits more customer use cases, but has 1000 fewer lines of code, would you argue that it's a worse app now?
I live in the Midwest and I've seen these cities first-hand over the course of several decades, and honestly your opinion is so dramatically off from the reality of these cities that all I can say is "you're so incredibly wrong" and walk away.
>> if I refactor my app so it runs faster and hits more customer use cases, but has 1000 fewer lines of code, would you argue that it's a worse app now?
That's not apples to apples though. Smaller app == good. City population declining is not necessarily "bad" per se but doesn't scream "urban revival" either.
Then there's the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history they went through in 2013. Doesn't really help with painting a picture of a thriving community even if they managed to clean up a few blocks here and there.
Kind of a sloppily-written article, tbh. The stats are good, but the shift at the last paragraph to "why we should care" is very weak. And while, yes, I'm sure the White House's policies aren't doing urban revival any favors, it seems to me that we collectively need to stop freaking out every time the wind changes direction. Who's to say that whatever artificial incentives we create to shore up city populations won't have unintended consequences of their own?
There is really one one reason cities are not gaining population as fast (or they are losing it) as they have been relatively recently: the astronomical cost of living in major urban centers. The article points this out, but I think it's conclusion, that urban revival is over because of this, is pretty odd. Prices are so high because there are still way more people that want to live in central cities than there is housing. If the urban revival were truly over, so many people wouldn't want to live there.
This is also my first thought when people say "Well, nobody wants to move to the Bay area anymore, everybody's leaving". Well, why is the rent still so high?
There are still many people moving to SF, especially those who work in companies in SF where the high compensation makes living in SF possible. Lots of people don't want to deal with travelling from outside SF to the city. Taking BART / Caltrain is soul sucking. Lots of young, unmarried people love the vibe of the city, and are willing to fork out part of their income to live there.
Rent in SF is going down actually. 2 years ago we moved into our apartment with my girlfriend and whatever price they mentioned our immediate response "YES WHERE DO I SIGN" just because we were so happy to even find a vacancy at all.
1 year ago they wanted to raise our rent $400 (about 6%), we negotiated it down to a $40 increase. Pretty good right?
Well, this year we negotiated our rent down by almost $300. In SoMa. Our rent is now cheaper than it was when we first moved in.
Next year we're hoping to move to a bigger place for the same price or cheaper. It's probably going to be possible.
Fun fact: Our apartment building considers it a success if they get 50% of their tenants to renew the lease.
The trouble is that urban real estate hyperinflation prices out all the stuff that makes cities cool. Eventually they just become big overpriced corporate office parks.
This only means there is lots of unsatisfied demand. That's more or less the policy endgame of NIMBYism and anti-gentrification: keep things affordable for existing residents by removing them from market pressures, then let the market deter unwanted outsiders.
EDIT: I should add that my point is, there's no reason it couldn't remain this way forever. Urban revival could be over, even though the desire for it isn't.
I keep waiting for a country like India or Japan to start building arcologies and others to adopt the solution. The way many people live, even a slum out of 'Shadowrun' would have more amenities.
Here in the Boston area, Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville now have lower population and more units of housing than they did before WWII. The average was four residents per housing unit and now it is only two. This is partly why there is never enough housing no matter how much you build: the more there is available, the more people will want to have.
As a counterpoint, one could argue that the normal price we'd expect doesn't factor in externalities like infrastructure and maintenance.
So the inflated price could, from an exterior observation, be in fact better aligned with true, long term settlement costs.
The sad part is the inflated rents don't seem to go towards these externalities either, but to landlords' pockets and land managers' margins. Even though the price is theoretically correct, the market reflects it for the wrong reasons giving the sell side an undeserved moral argument.
Oh, I'm not talking about property taxes, I'm talking about protecting other people from the evils of shadow, or from observing any evidence that they live in a major world city in 2017 and not a quaint Midwestern town in 1950.
Well, sure, the industrial waste has to go somewhere, right? Given China's sizable problems with air, water, and soil pollution, not sure that's really the right example.
Maybe in about 4-5 american cities where there is pressure on land. For all the rest, most cities still have a lot of vacancy and abandoned areas near their downtown. Tasteful low-rise infill would already be an enormous improvement. If more cities would be look like the low rise downtowns of savannah or charleston, I expect people would love to move there and live more densely. So america shouldn't only learn from Hongkong, but also from its own past.
This is a red herring and one that sets off alarms in NIMBY heads, but most American cities are a long way from needing more high rises. What they need are vast tracts of 5 and 6 story apartment buildings. Like Paris. Or Brooklyn. San Francisco is only 44 sq/mi and like half of it is dominated by detached single-family dwellings. That's absurd.
San Francisco doesn't need to become Manhattan. It could jump light years ahead if it tried to be more like Queens.
Yeah I certainly would not want to have to Uber around town every day. If I had that kind of money to blow, I'd either buy a car or I'd live downtown and not in the suburbs.
I guess I can imagine subsidized Uber and other services of its ilk making it more practical to get a ride back and forth from the city for various events. But it's hard to see it making any difference in my day to day exurban life. I have a car and that's what I'm going to use on a typical (or even not so typical) day.
Perhaps, but Uber can replace your third, fourth, fifth, etc. car.
I, personally, have two older, completely paid for cars. When one eventually goes, I will not feel the need to replace it immediately since I can use Lyft to get around if my remaining car is offline.
I think remote work increasing in viability & popularity will continue pushing this trend over time. Many people who work in software and other computer-centric jobs (myself included) no longer feel pressure to live central to a big city for work anymore.
not sure, from my experience most companies still prefer on-site and when they offer remote, it's more of a tempoary perk not meant to be used permanently. Also salaries seem to be lower/high paying remote jobs are harder to get.
Several large companies that experimented with full-time remote work have ended those experiments and declared it to be a failure. I expect we will see it trend down, not up.
Maybe some new, large, remote-first organizations will be born, but it seems unlikely that they would pay rich-country salaries.
Remote-first is the way to go, I think. That's how my current employer functions and I think it works pretty well. You definitely don't want to be the one guy who's remote and left out of lots of stuff. I also think it's much more likely to work at a smaller org than a large one.
Of course, even in remote-first occasional face time is important. So some traveling is involved.
What this article doesn't mention is that while in some cities like SF, where rents are astronomically high, there's a huge influx of tech workers whose compensations are also relatively high. That coupled with not wanting to deal with traffic as well as younger generation of workers attracted to the city scene results in more and more people crowding into the city. The increase in development of high rise residential is also supportive of the urban revival (cultural, generational, financial) and demand in SF.
That's a good thing. Over-urbanization is a real problem. It's much worse outside the US, with monsters such as Delhi and Sao Paulo, with huge slums. The US has managed to avoid that.
The other failure mode is where the rich cities eat the country. Japan did that - Tokyo and Osaka are growing, and the rest of the country is emptying out. China is trying desperately to keep Beijing from growing further.
>Over-urbanization is a real problem. It's much worse outside the US, with monsters such as Delhi and Sao Paulo, with huge slums. The US has managed to avoid that.
I'm failing to see how most of US 'middle-class" suburb district do not amount to slums.
Of course walled communities near rich cities are well off, but other than that look at what these suburbs are in flyover states and poorer part of south-east
That's a weird statement. Residential neighborhoods of major cities might tend to be slums, and rural areas might tend to be slums, but most suburbs of major cities are nice upper middle class areas. Sure if your city has five suburbs, one might be the slums, and over the decades that might switch from one to another to another as they cycle around, but by-and-large actual suburban cities exist because of the middle class.
>suburbs of major cities are nice upper middle class areas.
Yes, they are for sure. I'm not speaking about the at all.
What is a slum? A place where lots of people whose socioeconomic peculiarities prevent them from engaging in a meaningful economic activity. They can't get education, meaningful job locally, or have enought money to relocate. Eventually, overconcentration of such people weeds out all remaining economic activity out of the area and drives value of whatever is there down.
You said "I fail to see how most US suburbs are different than slums" and then when challenged on it, you say "no no, I'm not talking about that". So what exactly are you talking about?
Or are you just making the claim that the upper middle class don't go to college, don't have jobs, and don't make any money? Because that's even more ridiculous.
Well, I have lost the point here. It was better to say that 1. a notable lot of 'middle class' neighborhoods are middle class in name only, 2. average suburb of non-first tier cities got worse off over the years 3. genuine slumification did occur in few cities, 4. more are approaching that borderline
I grew up in a middle class suburb on the edge of the Phoenix sprawl. Your comment is a little ... unreasonable? How much time have you spent in either suburbs or slums? Or do you usually just fly over them?
Oh gotcha. A single city is representative of the entire country. Like how all American cities are bombed-out gangland because that's how Detroit is, or maybe how all American cities are rich economic powerhouses because that's how NYC is, or maybe how all American cities regularly get to temperatures over 100F because Miami does.
One city represents the entire country, after all.
What a ridiculous statement. Middle class suburbs are equivalent to inner city slums? You must have a very strange concept of what the suburban middle class is.
Where do you think people go when they move out of cities? Is having 3% of the countries land mass covered with dense cities really better than having 50% of it covered with attrocious suburbs and parking lots? Where everyone has to have a car and hour long commutes?
Comparing with slums in third world countries is ridiculous. The US has plenty of slums. White people and businesses fleeing cities makes it worse, not better. I don't know how you confused cause and effect so badly to think cities cause poverty.
After adapting to life in 500sqft, a single family home just seems kind of... disgusting. Wasteful. On the other hand, I pay an enormous premium to have a public transit commute of only 25 minutes, while this is totally normally in more car-oriented areas.
I hope that, with the return to the suburbs, we distribute those suburbs around the country instead of having a few instances of enormous sprawl. If we continue to scale just a few cities outwards until traffic gets catastrophic, we're going to be spending a hell of a long time commuting. (Even if there's transit, because transit for single-family-home sprawl will never work that well).
Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental impacts.
The urban revival never really happened. Some yuppies moved downtown in a few cities. Big deal. Middle class people kept leaving cities in droves. Even NYC, which boomed economically, lost middle income people from 2002-2006: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090205/FREE/902059930
The former chief economist at Trulio has written quite a bit on this theme. One of his conclusions has been that a fairly specific demographic of college-educated young people has moved to a relatively limited number of very dense urban cores. Beyond that there's more of a shift to suburbs (which are urban in census terminology like pretty much everywhere you can actually see your neighbors).
Hm? Every city in the states that I've lived in (NYC, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland) and some outside the states (Wellington) have seen tons of growth and development, well outside of what could typically be construed as the downtown.
The crime explanation doesn't make that much sense for Chicago, which is geographically quite large and remains one of the most segregated in the country (due in part to the legacy of redlining, which continued into the 1970s).
Most of the increases in crime aren't felt in areas that urban revivalists move to, but rather in areas to the south and west that for all intents and purposes might as well be different cities.
The murder rate in Englewood is a poor explanation for whether or not families will remain in Roscoe Village or Bucktown.
You'd think that with ever-increasing evidence of the havoc that climate change is having on our coastal cities, we'd be better off actively discouraging more people moving to the coasts and investing in other places.
Short commutes to urban centered jobs are VERY attractive to such families. It might mean the urban core boom is over but cities are more than just fancy downtown neighborhoods.
92 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadIn my own city, the rising home values have made it economically viable to pour money into formerly decaying row houses that were built for working class families over a century ago. So at least a lot of the ancient, unsafe wiring, plumbing, lead paint, asbestos, etc., is being dealt with by people who can afford to foot the bill.
Edit: Richard Florida is a very famous urbanist, but take his predictions with a grain of salt. He has been wrong before, self-admittedly so (https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richa...). The descriptive aspects of this article might be right (the urban rush is slowing or reversing, for certain reasons), but his prescriptive descriptions- maybe less so.
Only this doesn't make any more sense now than it did sense.
People are born every year, not in spurts.
Thus the flux of "tech yupsters" coming into SF should be as constant as those getting married and going to the suburbs -- keeping the state steady.
If that isn't the case, it's not because "those tech yupsters eventually started family" (which every generation does at some point anyway), but because the influx of young tech people to SF had peaked at some point in the past.
More generally, people are born in spurts. The baby boom generation and their children, the millennials, are larger than adjacent generations.
Actually the post-millennials are 69 million, over 66 millions for the millennials. And the baby-boomers were 76 million.
Gentrification and renewal came to blows right in the middle and left what was probably the greatest blemish on the urban unchanged... because those were where the actual poverty was all along in the first place. The urban cores that got "renewed" were never squalor and dilapidation - they might not have been as trendy, but city centers have too much general access to be that useless no matter the popular trends. Unless you have a city like Detroit they just cannot degrade that much.
Which really means all this hype about renewal is really just vapid air. Nobody is putting big money into actually innovating on the city concept, its all about buying politicians for favorable zoning over actually making anything lasting and meaningful out of the interest in urban renewal.
My city was almost completely dead as recently as the 90s. Very high crime, lots of abandoned buildings, no businesses in the city center, only poor people lived downtown. Today there is a brewery on every corner, food trucks parked outside every day, live music almost every night of the week, and tons of people who don't own cars making it because downtown is an amazing place to be.
And you talk about Detroit: Detroit was one of the biggest benefactors of the urban renewal. Sure it's not back to its pre-1968 glory days, but downtown is a safe and entertaining place to be, plenty of young people hang out, Woodward Ave in particular is hopping pretty much every night of the week. It went from being the place you warned your kids about to being the place you take your kids for a weekend while you watch a baseball game.
It's easy to look at Manhattan and say "so much for urban renewal", but look at smaller cities in the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St Louis. All cities that just 20 years ago were a death trap if you were there after dark, and certainly not a place you want to live. Now it's hard to tell their downtown cores were ever abandoned in the first place.
Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day.
according to the stats- population wise they went from ~1 mil in 2009 to under 700k in 2016. there are a couple of decent 1x1 mile enclaves there - midtown, greektown and nearby sports arenas other than that it sucks.
>> Cleveland
much nicer than it used to be overall but plenty of areas where you have to watch your back. also, while not as drastic as Detroit, population figures are declining as well.
Milwaukee is marginally better than it used to be but barely a poster child for "urban renewal".
Can we not just agree that Detroit (et al) are better off than they were 20 years ago and that this is a good thing overall? You can nitpick "yeah but it's still not the greatest city in the world" all you want, but you might find that no one else gives a fuck about your definition. Progress is progress no matter how you want to redefine it.
>much nicer than it used to be
That's quite literally all I'm saying. That's the very definition of "urban renewal". Better than it used to be.
but them numbers don't lie either :) if some city has it's population go down by 30% I don't think this qualifies as "renewal" even if a couple of areas has gotten better within that same timeframe.
gentrification - as in very targeted/high density (in some cases literally a few blocks type deal) move of young-ish professionals into formerly dilapidated areas - it does exist no doubt and in some (very few) cases - like LES in Manhattan - can be a pre-cursor to a more global "renewal". But these types of cases are few and far in between.
I guess my point is there hasn't been a significant urban renewal to speak of lately, the kind that can be "over" because it has to kick in first before that can happen.
Think of it this way: if I refactor my app so it runs faster and hits more customer use cases, but has 1000 fewer lines of code, would you argue that it's a worse app now?
I live in the Midwest and I've seen these cities first-hand over the course of several decades, and honestly your opinion is so dramatically off from the reality of these cities that all I can say is "you're so incredibly wrong" and walk away.
You're so incredibly wrong.
That's not apples to apples though. Smaller app == good. City population declining is not necessarily "bad" per se but doesn't scream "urban revival" either.
Then there's the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history they went through in 2013. Doesn't really help with painting a picture of a thriving community even if they managed to clean up a few blocks here and there.
>> Still better than Flint...
you're not setting the bar very high are you :)
Rent in SF is going down actually. 2 years ago we moved into our apartment with my girlfriend and whatever price they mentioned our immediate response "YES WHERE DO I SIGN" just because we were so happy to even find a vacancy at all.
1 year ago they wanted to raise our rent $400 (about 6%), we negotiated it down to a $40 increase. Pretty good right?
Well, this year we negotiated our rent down by almost $300. In SoMa. Our rent is now cheaper than it was when we first moved in.
Next year we're hoping to move to a bigger place for the same price or cheaper. It's probably going to be possible.
Fun fact: Our apartment building considers it a success if they get 50% of their tenants to renew the lease.
EDIT: I should add that my point is, there's no reason it couldn't remain this way forever. Urban revival could be over, even though the desire for it isn't.
As an aside, I'd say people satisfying their desire to have their own space is great thing that we should be optimizing for.
The sad part is the inflated rents don't seem to go towards these externalities either, but to landlords' pockets and land managers' margins. Even though the price is theoretically correct, the market reflects it for the wrong reasons giving the sell side an undeserved moral argument.
San Francisco doesn't need to become Manhattan. It could jump light years ahead if it tried to be more like Queens.
I, personally, have two older, completely paid for cars. When one eventually goes, I will not feel the need to replace it immediately since I can use Lyft to get around if my remaining car is offline.
Once transportation goes entirely autonomous, vehicle speeds could slowly creep up, making farther suburbs more accessible.
We're talking at least one decade, but probably several decades, but things are going to change pretty dramatically.
Maybe some new, large, remote-first organizations will be born, but it seems unlikely that they would pay rich-country salaries.
Of course, even in remote-first occasional face time is important. So some traveling is involved.
Relative to what, exactly? Relative to teachers, office workers, state employeers - sure.
Relative to the cost of living? Hardly "high".
Florida cites 5-15% increases in some cities. That's like returning to the terribly violent year of... 2010 or so?
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/chicago-driv...
We're still 300% below the violent crime rate in the early 90s.
The other failure mode is where the rich cities eat the country. Japan did that - Tokyo and Osaka are growing, and the rest of the country is emptying out. China is trying desperately to keep Beijing from growing further.
I'm failing to see how most of US 'middle-class" suburb district do not amount to slums.
Of course walled communities near rich cities are well off, but other than that look at what these suburbs are in flyover states and poorer part of south-east
Yes, they are for sure. I'm not speaking about the at all.
What is a slum? A place where lots of people whose socioeconomic peculiarities prevent them from engaging in a meaningful economic activity. They can't get education, meaningful job locally, or have enought money to relocate. Eventually, overconcentration of such people weeds out all remaining economic activity out of the area and drives value of whatever is there down.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/...
Or are you just making the claim that the upper middle class don't go to college, don't have jobs, and don't make any money? Because that's even more ridiculous.
One city represents the entire country, after all.
Comparing with slums in third world countries is ridiculous. The US has plenty of slums. White people and businesses fleeing cities makes it worse, not better. I don't know how you confused cause and effect so badly to think cities cause poverty.
I hope that, with the return to the suburbs, we distribute those suburbs around the country instead of having a few instances of enormous sprawl. If we continue to scale just a few cities outwards until traffic gets catastrophic, we're going to be spending a hell of a long time commuting. (Even if there's transit, because transit for single-family-home sprawl will never work that well).
Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental impacts.
That assumes the energy used to charge the cars is clean. It also excludes the cost of laying tarmac to everywhere.
In general, humans living closer together conserves more natural resources.
Hm? Every city in the states that I've lived in (NYC, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland) and some outside the states (Wellington) have seen tons of growth and development, well outside of what could typically be construed as the downtown.
Most of the increases in crime aren't felt in areas that urban revivalists move to, but rather in areas to the south and west that for all intents and purposes might as well be different cities.
The murder rate in Englewood is a poor explanation for whether or not families will remain in Roscoe Village or Bucktown.
http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-20...
Short commutes to urban centered jobs are VERY attractive to such families. It might mean the urban core boom is over but cities are more than just fancy downtown neighborhoods.
Yes of course, those must be the reasons why young people liked to live in easy to maintain and affordable properties near their place of business.