On this post.
The question is why are people moving back into the cities, when real estate in the cities is so much more expensive, (i.e. despite the fact that the “rent is too damn high”), the appeal of city life is not noticeably greater than it was a decade or two ago, and the cost-differential is so high that it practically erases the compensation and lifestyle gains?
Read the whole comment.
I see gentrification occurring primarily because of the New Commanding Heights. Education and health care concentrate in cities, in part because of tax advantages. That in turn draws affluent professionals. With enough affluent professionals, you get young people wanting to live in cities to be around other affluent professionals, in order to perpetuate bifurcated family patterns.
While I agree that education and health care are “The New Commanding Heights” (at least in the non-coastal US), it’s not clear to me that this is the force behind urbanization. Major employers (factories, government) have always been located in cities, but urbanization is new.
I would guess instead that the causal factor is that young professionals are delaying marriage and children (I speak from experience here).
The average age of first marriage is now 27 (women) and 29 (men), up from 23 and 26 in 1990.
If suburbs are relatively more attractive for families, and cities are relatively more attractive for singles and couples, then we would expect to see this shift based on demographics alone.
Apart from the demographics of who lives in/is moving to cities, consider that while the purchase price of residential real estate in cities may be high, the various costs of suburban residential real estate (taxes, insurance, maintenance) AND the TIME-cost of commuting, have been rising as suburban real estate dwellings have grown both larger and farther out from city-centers. Who’s got the time?
It’s not just hanging out with like-kind, IMHO. For professionals, either never married, living together w/o kids, or divorced singles, you also need to weigh an ~hour drive (in heavy commuter traffic) or train commute each way and the suburban lifestyle (large house to clean, landscaping to keep up, absence while traveling, or pay someone to do all that) against an apartment or loft that’s right-sized for one or two, a close commute, and minimal time required for upkeep, and you can lock the door and leave for a week or more.
OTOH, I don’t know if it’s “the chicken or the egg” that came first. Here in Denver, many of the uglier, blighted-looking downtown locations that used to overlook train tracks and trash-strewn abandoned commercial lots, now hold lovely, modern loft buildings that are now close to light rail lines and city-center feeding arterials (and the Performing Arts Complex, Coors Stadium, Pepsi Center, and Sports Authority Field, etc.) And apparently, there’s no problem filling those lofts with residents.
“Commuting Costs” constitute the major trade-off that drives the strong real-estate cost vs. distance-from-the-center correlation (on average, naturally).
We might expect that a vast improvement in transportation infrastructure or systems that significantly reduced commuting times would have the equivalent of an ‘income effect’ and ‘substitution effect’.
On the one hand, reduced commuting costs might take a lot of pressure off the prices of central real estate and flatten the steep cost slope.
On the other hand, it might drag in a lot of marginal entrants who were being kept out by their limited time-and-money budgets, but who might now pile in, in addition to increasing the transportation activity of the existing residents.
That’s because commuting costs are so high and important for most people.
So it really doesn’t matter how many lanes are on how many highways in LA or Tokyo or Chicago, etc. Whatever they do, the traffic will still quickly become awful, because only awful commuting is able to deter even more people from coming in.
Job growth in the suburbs has been much stronger than in the cities. Are you saying that it is easier to commute from city to suburb then from suburb to suburb?
Check out the Denver light rail map. Everything goes from suburb to Civic Center or Union Station, downtown, and the rest of the build-out will be similar. Most of the bus routes do as well. To go from suburb to suburb, you typically have to ride toward downtown & transfer.
When I worked in the Denver Tech Center, it was a 20 min. drive from my home in Littleton; it was a 45 min. bus ride, and I’d have to ride to the Alameda/ Broadway station & make a 2-min transfer to the DTC bus for that. If I missed that transfer, it would be a 2-hr. bus ride. That was a dozen years ago: maybe it’s better now.
http://www.rtd-denver.com/LightRail_Map.shtml
It is also possible to be more “anonymous” in (be less “vulnerable” in the social groupings of) a city.
“Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are catchpenny phrases. There is much of the former, but very little of the latter. Speech is generally the result of automatic thought rather than of ratiocination. Independent thought is of all mental processes the most difficult and the most rare; habit, tradition, and reverence for antiquity unite to forbid it, and these combined influences are strengthened by the law of heredity. The tendency to automatic action of the mind is still further promoted by the environment of modern life. The crowding of populations into cities, and the division and subdivision of labor in the factory and the shop, and even in the so-called learned professions, have a tendency to increase the dependence of the individual upon the mass of society. And this interdependence of the units of society renders them more and more imitative, and hence more and more automatic both mentally and physically.”
In a safe (considered) environment, which was not the case for most urban areas a couple decades ago, dense living has benefits for single and childless couple lifestyles, which is an increasing portion of an individual’s life in recent decades. The denser populations make it easier to find sexual partners as well as social relationships. The lifestyle and density also promotes external entertainments, such as bars, one-off restaurants, etc., which feeds back into encouraging the in-migration of singles and childless couples. The reduction to bearing only one or perhaps two children also reduces the pressure to move out of a benign urban environment when wealth allows bad urban schools, bad urban play environments to be avoided by private investment.
As for employment in healthcare and education, those industries tend to flow toward high density population areas, a further reinforcing feedback. But much of the other work is also becoming generic office-space based and so is easy to locate in the urban area. Manufacturing will linger as legacy factories exploit the capital (and regulatory) investments but new factories will develop on nearer the suburban outer rings as square footage per employee has near quadrupled for factories compared to the last century where it was similar to other types of industry. Thus, factory location is driven away from high urban land costs, does not require a nearby dense worker population and also gains from being located away from dense traffic difficulties.
All in all, this bodes ill for the trains, high speed or otherwise, except as booty-call transport since there will be less mass movement of workers to factories in urban environments, and even then services like Uber are likely prove more responsive to the quick trip across town at odd hours.
Plus one for working in the term booty call!
“in order to perpetuate bifurcated family patterns.”
Yes, assortative mating, and all that. But something that sometimes gets left out in these discussions is that it’s not just the genetic clustering that is easier to do now. It’s the fact that the more intelligent and educated you are, generally speaking, the longer you wait to actually start your bifurcated family. Cities can be awfully fun places to be if you are single, an SD or more above the mean, inclined to be choosy about who you settle down with and eager to have a good time in the meantime. So you get that job in the Research Triangle, or decide you’ll give Austin a try, or the Riverwalk in San Antonio has lots of cool bars, etc.
I think it’s interesting the way that an elite city like SF, traditionally a place for the hardcore childless libertines, is becoming so expensive that only a very productive, ambitious and essentially BOURGEOIS personality type can afford to live there. This changes the character of the city, to be less a mecca for those committed above all to having fun and avoiding family formation.
My guess is that the New Commanding Heights (NCH) is an effect of The Great Centralization, not the cause.
First, Health Care and Education are classic “non-outsourceable services” that require face-to-face physical proximity. Online educational resources does not seem to have put a dent in participation in the conventional, in-person model in our educational system.
Second, there are jurisdictions that have (or had) world class examples of NCH institutions, and some gentrify and some collapse, especially relative to other hubs, and I’m not sure whether there’s a good causal link or what a scatter plot would look like. These things weren’t enough of an ‘anchor’ to save some of those formerly prosperous rust-belt cities.
Third, while I am confident that the Great Centralization seems to be operating almost everywhere and in every country, I’m not sure that the economic incentives and neighborhood improvement phenomenon are homogenous internationally. For instance, certainly not every state has similar tax advantages for NCH institutions, though the fact that these are state institutions in many places complicated the issue.
But it is also true that many major metropolitan hubs abroad simply don’t have the blighted and impoverished urban core neighborhoods that became common in the US. Indeed, the city center in most other countries has almost always been the most desirable, expensive, and elite, with poor residents being exiled to the suburbs. In other words, there is nothing to gentrify in most of these places, and they are already nice and full of NCH institutions, and yet people continue to cram in and the real-estate prices are still going through the roof.
Indeed, it looks like The Great Inversion (driven by The Great Centralization) is merely reversing a temporary and aberrant US-specific circumstance and that America is now quickly moving towards the global norm. If that’s true, then “gentrification” is merely a symptom of the reversal of that temporary and aberrant condition, and otherwise has little to do with the broader phenomenon.
We’re not experiencing a bifurcated family pattern, we’re experiencing a trifurcated family pattern.
The lower class has children out of wedlock and lives in the city
The middle class has children in wedlock and lives in the suburbs
The professional class moves to the city to advance their careers, and generally does not reproduce. (As a first order of approximation, compare the ethnic distribution of any core city vs. the the ethnic distribution of the public school district there)
The lower class values survival. They are economically constrained by single parenthood. They move to the cities where there are welfare programs and subsidized mass transit.
The middle class values their children. Because of the above, urban schools are underfunded, overcrowded, and often violent. Thus they move out to the suburbs where there is neither mass transit nor charity hospitals. In return, they gain schools that are cheaper, better, and safer.
The professional class values status-seeking. To distance themselves from the middle class, they take careers that the middle class cannot support a family on (non-profits, grad schools, organic farming), display hobbies that demand more time than a parent has (long overseas vacation, training for endurance events), and live places that are inhospitable to middle-class families (the city).
There’s an old riddle of a man who wishes to cross a river with a fox, a chicken, and a sack of grain. The fox wants to eat the chicken, the chicken wants to eat the grain, and the boat seats only one.
Similarly, the professional class avoids the middle class and the middle class avoids the lower class, and neighbors have to share school districts.
The solutions to the two riddles are analogous.
I still think a big part of this “inversion” is driven by status and allegiance signalling. Progressive millenials, mostly the children of David Brooks’ Bono pals (and I am sorta/kinda one of these people) have accepted and internalized all the lessons they were taught over the years by their parents and educators about the evils of sprawl, smog, carbon footprints, etc., and converged on the idea that living in high density neighborhoods with extensive provisions of social services and public goods more generally is the most socially responsible lifestyle.
Not that the other factors listed are wrong, I just think the degree to which twentysomething urbanites are the products of their parent’s value system.
Should not be overlooked, is the missing phrase on the end of that last sentence.
While the plural of anecdote isn’t data, I think my younger sister’s case is a perfect example of these principles in action. She graduated from a large state school and immediately went into an Occupation Therapy master’s program. After graduating, she took a job at a large rehab hospital in Atlanta (New Commanding Heights 1). Being an Atlanta native, she’s aware of the surrounding suburbs and has lived in suburban Atlanta her whole life but didn’t think for even a second about living in the ‘burbs.
Why? She doesn’t want an hour or longer commute. She doesn’t want to own a large property as a single young woman (Bifurcated family? Well, she’s 26, happily single, and well compensated relative to her peer group.). She doesn’t want to live far from other similarly situated people (Assortative living which leads back to Bifurcated family.). She also bought a condo very close to work which is in a part of town being billed as “Atlanta’s Rodeo Drive” (More new commanding heights as real estate development seeks around growth industries.). Her friends almost all live in the city and are about 15 minutes away.
And let’s consider the opposite and more “traditional” route here: She buys a home in the suburbs which requires constant upkeep. She’s priced out of the high end of homes so she buys pre-owned in a moderately wealthy suburb like Marietta, Roswell, or Lawrenceville with only moderately improving property values. Her home also requires maintenance and upkeep which is all up to her. She spends an hour or more driving into work putting mileage on her car and costing her precious free time which she could be spending with her friends. Her friends live far away and traveling to see them takes, yes, an hour or more. Her neighbors in this neighborhood are not even close to her age. They’re mostly married. Many have kids. Some are older but aren’t selling anytime soon because they never quite got that whole “housing ladder” thing. They actually earn less money because they’re in crappy jobs outside the new commanding heights.
So why exactly go live outside the city?
So why exactly go live outside the city?
Atlanta public schools.
If she chooses to have children, she will feel the overpowering urge to swim upstream to mate and spawn.
Thus, trifurcation. The priorities and lifestyles of the professional middle class so different from those of the family middle class that it’s hard to even call them the same class.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when her friends begin to have families. Will she double down on the single-in-the-city thing, or seek to move to the suburbs?
Anyway, I’m projecting. For the first time in my life I’m feeling the pressure to get married simply because everyone else is. It’s lonely being the third wheel. (OTOH marrying without love must be a TERRIBLY lonely thing…)
Increase in relative safety viz a biz suburbs and city via Section 8. See Ferguson as an example.
(More specifically, I’m asserting that the number of poor rowdies in urban areas have gone down while going up in the suburbs)