Back to the City: Young millennials prefer urban living
Serving as executive editor of Governing magazine for nearly two decades, Alan Ehrenhalt would have had a record to boast about had he done no more than assemble his crackerjack staff of writers and reporters, who made the magazine a must-read for those wishing to understand the workings of American federalism. He also penned a consistently insightful—and politically unpredictable—column on state and local government. As a columnist, moreover, Ehrenhalt often built on his own original reporting. A column, say, on light rail in Minneapolis would discuss not just transportation but also the potential impact on property taxes for the lots on one street corner. A column on politicians caught up in patronage scandals would come around to accepting the inevitability of such unfair hiring—and provide some good reasons for it. Like a policy-oriented version of Calvin Trillin’s “U.S. Journal” columns in the New Yorker, Ehrenhalt’s editorials would regularly uncover local situations that showed how America was changing—such as Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s support for neighborhood activists seeking to shut down the city’s legendary taverns.
Now editor of Stateline, the Pew Center on the States’ news service on state politics and policy, Ehrenhalt has brought his mix of sharp-eyed observation and analysis to a new book: The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. Its thesis is straightforward but not uncontroversial: that a large group of “millennial young adults” prefer urban over suburban, and especially exurban, living—and that, as a result, they will push lower-income households, including new immigrants, to settle outside core cities. This shift will re-create, to some extent, the pattern of early twentieth-century Vienna and Paris. In other words, the phrase “inner city,” long a synonym (and euphemism) for American social problems, will go the way of the Berlin Wall.
Ehrenhalt reports from the front lines—whether Bushwick in Brooklyn, where an unlovely industrial urban-scape and entrenched poverty haven’t deterred a wave of artists and young professionals from moving in, or Houston, where a once-unpopulated downtown is filling up with apartment complexes. This new urban bustle, in Ehrenhalt’s view, reflects the fact that “in many American cities, the question of where to live is already as much a question of time” (that is, commuting time) “as it is of money.” Looking elsewhere, he finds that the once lily-white Atlanta exurbs of Gwinnett County have become a center of Hispanic, and especially Korean, immigration—a dramatic transformation for both metro Atlanta and the American South. Key to such change is not just a new racial tolerance, but undernoticed trends such as the availability of empty strip-mall space for aspiring entrepreneurs. “The exurbs will be ports of entry for newcomers and minorities who will either not be attracted to, or not be able to afford, life in the center of a metropolitan area,” Ehrenhalt writes. “This is what demographic inversion is about.” Weaving census and public-opinion data throughout, Ehrenhalt displays the same narrative and reporting skills he put to good use in The Lost City, his underappreciated portrait of working-class Chicago in the 1950s.