Review essay: who loses when a city develops?

Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class--and What We Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2017)

Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood (Public Affairs, 2017)

We've got to make sure the people here are being lifted up from the rising tide.

--ZAK PASHAK, Detroit (quoted at Moskowitz 2017, p. 76)

Peter Moskowitz has a passion for social justice and a talent for long-form journalism, and both come across in How to Kill a City. Built around four urban case studies--New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York City--he looks at the harms that have come to individuals and communities in the last decade's urban resurgence. The damage isn't hard to find, either: people priced out of their longtime homes, landmark buildings torn down and neighborhood establishments shuttered, diverse communities taken over by upper middle class whites.

My main complaint with Moskowitz is that his targets, and the rage they inspire, are too easy. It's easy to point to the racist origins of our cities' physical design, to juxtapose the struggles of the marginalized with the amusements of the upper middle class, to nostalgize everything that's lost and find fault with everything that's replaced it. "Every year I'd see fewer sex workers walking down Washington Street at night" (p 164). Or to complain about cultural differences--"The New York that increasingly engulfs me seems even less interesting than I am" (p 163)--or insensitivity. That's too bad, because while there's a fair amount of explanation and a great deal of (mostly justifiable) outrage over what's happened, there's very little by way of alternative course of action (though see pp. 210-213).

Joe Cortright and his colleagues have documented that poor urban neighborhoods that haven't gentrified, and that's most of them, have become more marginalized. Meanwhile the financial, ecological and cultural consequences of suburban sprawl are not sustainable. The path forward for urban neighborhoods is not some unnamed something-that's-way-better-than-gentrification; it's gentrification that takes account of everyone new and old, black and white, rich and poor.

To extend the quotation above, which Moskowitz dismisses as mere rationalization, a non-rising tide doesn't lift any boats. (Or, maybe, in a zero-sum sort of way, a few get rich at the expense of all the others.) A rising tide, though, as Moskowitz describes throughout his book, can also swamp the boats. The answer is not to wish the tide away, or to curse it, but to manage it for the benefit of all.

That is, of course, easier said than done. A number of cities have tried to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, but their instruments are blunt and their effects uncertain.

Happily Richard Florida, who comes in for his own share of Moskowitz's rage (pp 78-83) as a supposed advocate of unchecked gentrification, is on the case in his latest book, The New Urban Crisis. He describes the causes and ill effects of "winner-take-all urbanism": The most highly prized talent and the most profitable industries, which used to be spread across many smaller and medium-sized cities, increasingly concentrate in a few superstar behemoths (Florida 2017, p 18). Inequality is most severe in our most successful cities (Fig 6.1, p 110): a 2016 Brookings Institution study found only nine of the top 100 metro areas were more socially inclusive in 2014 than they were in 2005, although nearly all had experienced economic growth during this period (p. 91; the updated version is cited below).

Winner-take-all urbanism stems partly from the clustering effect taken to its extreme, but also to "efforts of urban landlords and homeowners to restrict what is built, and in doing so to keep the prices of their own real estate holdings high" (p. 24), and in some "superstar cities," land prices artificially inflated by "the global super-rich... looking for safe places to park their money" (p. 39). As a result, the "creative class" reap all the economic benefits of development, while the service and working classes are often worse off after paying for housing (Table 2.2, p. 31). The less advantaged are shunted into neighborhoods with more crime, worse schools, and the dimmest prospects for upward mobility (pp 149-150) 

Florida being Florida, there are a lot of data and indexes to measure these phenomena. The ultimate metric is the New Urban Crisis Index (Fig 10.1, p. 187) which combines economic segregation, wage inequality, income inequality and housing affordability. Bridgeport, Connecticut ranks highest overall (.978); Los Angeles is #2 and the top large metro (.972). Of Moskowitz's four cases, New York is #3 (.967) and San Francisco is #6 (.922), while the still-digging-out New Orleans is #36 (.787) and Detroit is #85 (.681).

Cedar Rapids scores a relatively benign .233 which ranks it #316 of 359, but one wonders: Have the costs of post-flood development in hip New Bohemia been borne by the working class people who used to live there (a la New Orleans, described in Moskowitz's chapters 1-3)? Is the MedQuarter going to contribute to an island of prosperity while pushing everyone else away (a la Detroit, described in Moskowitz's chapters 4-6)?

Florida's concluding chapter includes a multi-faceted strategy for a more effective urbanism (pp. 191-215):

1.  more effective clustering by developing the land we have more effectively and efficiently--deregulating land use but also using tools like land value tax to replace property tax, and tax increment local transfers to overcome local prejudice;
2.  strategic investments in infrastructure including mass transit and high-speed rail;
3.  building more affordable rental housing including vouchers;
4.  turning the tens of millions of low-paid service jobs we are stuck with into higher-paying jobs, including higher but locally-based minimum wage;
5.  anti-poverty investments in people (providing resources or helping them move to new and better neighborhoods) and neighborhoods (schools & early childhood development);
6.  to deal with urban disasters abroad, shifting the focus of America's foreign and international development policies from nation-building to city-building; and
7.  to overcome hostility to urban areas in state and federal governments today, a bipartisan movement of mayors to help cities and communities get the increased control they need to address all these challenges.

Florida's proposals are individually debatable, but provide a starting point for ensuring that everyone has a place at our communities' tables. Moskowitz's passionate accounts serve to show that funding urban development without demanding that benefits flow widely leads to gains at the top, stagnation or misery for everyone else. Cities should develop and develop boldly--and regressive state governments should get out of the way--but must not leave its residents to the mercies of whatever happens.

SEE ALSO:
"Gentrification: What Do We Know?" 26 July 2016
Kristen Jeffers, "Gentrification in Shaw Isn't So Black and White," Greater Greater Washington, 7 July 2017
Richard Shearer, Alec Friedhoff, Isha Shah and Alan Berube, "Metro Monitor: An Index of Inclusive Economic Growth in the 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas," Brookings Institution, March 2017
Josh Stephens, "Pursuing Inclusion, Equity in the Nation's Capital," Planetizen, 10 July 2017
David Whitehead, "Gentrification in DC is a West-of-the-Park Issue, Too," Greater Greater Washington, 21 July 2017

Gentrification in the Mission District

(mural in San Francisco's Mission District, swiped from nytimes.com)

One of the key principles of the new urbanism is neighborhood diversity, defined by Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton (The Regional City, 2001) as "mix[ing] different kinds of people and activities in close proximity and provid[ing] places for them to interact" (ch. 2). (Their other core principles are human scale and preservation.) Neighborhoods containing people of different races, social classes, occupations and sexual orientations have more vitality throughout the day, a greater sense of community, and more public involvement. Randolph T. Hester (Design for Ecological Democracy, 2006) urges designers to overcome "shortsighted interest-group divisions" so cities "can be formed as wholes rather than balkanized" (ch. 7). Balkanized, as opposed to diverse, neighborhoods lead to concentrations of poverty which are dangerous and constrict opportunity, and enclaves of the well-off which lead to social isolation and ecologically-damaging car dependency.

The goal for lower-income neighborhoods, such as Mound View, Wellington Heights and the Taylor Area in Cedar Rapids, not to mention downtown, ought to be what I call "gentle gentrification"--attract jobs and people of means to these areas without pushing out the people who already live there. Andres Duany and colleagues (Suburban Nation, 2000) cite some "time-tested" methods of diversifying upper-middle-class neighborhoods, including row housing, mixed-use buildings, granny flats and "location-efficient mortgages," while distributing public or affordable housing as sparsely as possible (ch. 3). Hester notes resistance to such integration, mostly but not entirely from the well-off, and urges planners to "arm the citizenry with an understanding of the critical importance that increased diversity plays in making human habitation resilient" (p. 199). Our fate is collective, suggest these writers, however much we might want to buy our way out of it.

Where gentrification has occurred, however, it has rarely been gentle. When well-off people rediscover an urban neighborhood, the influx tends to drive up housing prices such that it becomes no longer affordable for less well-off people to live there. Moreover, anecdotal evidence suggests that the classes mix uncomfortably, if indeed they do at all. The latest tales are from San Francisco, which seems to be the new Silicon valley. Well-paid employees of high-tech companies like Google and Twitter are moving into urban neighborhoods like the Mission District (Gonzales, Goode and Miller). Stories abound of residents impacted by the new arrivals, most touchingly a 97-year-old woman who received an eviction notice because the apartment building in which she lives is going to be converted into upscale condominiums. There are other complaints about the newly-arrived acting rudely, and rowdily disrupting the neighborhood's annual Dia de la Raza parade.

At its simplest level, what's happening in the Mission District is an illustration of how economic marketplaces work. In a free market, the price of any good reflects (1) how much demand there is for it and (2) how much of it is available. When demand for a good increases, as happens when a residential area becomes trendy, the price goes up to the point ("equilibrium price") where there are just enough willing buyers to purchase the available supply. Others who want the good but can't afford the new equilibrium price now find themselves "priced out" of the market, even if, as in some of the San Francisco cases, they've lived in the neighborhood for many years.

The San Francisco example is complicated by a number of factors that may not apply elsewhere.

• Rental prices are controlled, though in California controls can be evaded if the property is removed from the rental market and offered for sale. 
• The City of San Francisco is unusually crowded. 
• One of the letter-writers to the print edition of the New York Times referred to a metropolitan growth boundary, which would have the effect of constraining supply of housing; according to the law of supply and demand that would put upward pressure on prices, not to mention limit options for people priced out of their old neighborhood. However, it's not clear to me how strong the growth boundary is. Calthorpe and Fulton, while advocating and defending steps taken by Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle (ch. 6), list San Francisco among those "superregions" struggling with regional issues (ch. 7; see also Hester ch. 9). There has been regional planning since the 1950s, they say, but it has been "ad hoc, decentralized and incremental."
• Very few cities have to deal with a sudden influx of millionaires, while about 1600 San Franciscans entered that charmed circle when Twitter went public last month.

New urbanists argue that there are public interests in neighborhoods that are vibrant and diverse, not to mention relatively stable, and in restricting metropolitan sprawl, sufficient to justify some government policy action. University of Southern California Professor Kevin Starr notes about San Francisco, "There has to be some kind of public support to make sure you don’t just have a city of the very wealthy, but people to make the city run.... You can’t have a city of just rich people. A city needs restaurant workers, a city needs schoolteachers, a city needs taxi drivers” (quoted in Goode and Miller).

The experience of San Francisco and other cities raises disturbing questions of whether market forces, social forces, and unintended consequences of public policies conspire to make those goals unattainable. If that's so, the poor lose out no matter what's done.

SOURCES

Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Island, 2001)

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point, 2000)

Richard Gonzales, "As Rent Soars, Longtime San Francisco Tenants Fight to Stay," npr.org, 3 December 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/12/03/247531636/as-rent-soars-longtime-san-francisco-tenants-fight-to-stay

Erica Goode and Claire Cain Miller, "Backlash by the Bay: Tech Riches Alter a City," New York Times, 24 November 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/backlash-by-the-bay-tech-riches-alter-a-city.html

Randolph T. Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy (MIT Press, 2006)