4/5/2016

America'surbanrenaissanceisonlyfortherichVox

America's urban renaissance is

only for the rich
Updated by Matthew Yglesias on March 30, 2016, 1:30 p.m. ET

@mattyglesias matt@vox.com

It's obvious if you walk around many neighborhoods in New

York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and other large cities that
urban living is enjoying a revival in the 21st-century United
States of America. But Census Bureau statistics also clearly
show that the overall population of the United States is more
suburban than ever. How can both be true?
A new analysis from Jed Kolko (
http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/30/urban-revival-not-for-mostamericans/) shows that the answer is class a rich minority of
the population is becoming more urbanized even as the overall
population becomes more suburban:

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Jed Kolko ( http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/30/urban-revival-not-for-most-americans/)

The top 20 percent of the population has become a lot more

likely to live in a high-density urban neighborhood, and the next
20 percent is somewhat more likely. But the bottom 60
percent and especially the bottom 10 percent have
become far less urbanized.

Childless college graduates are moving to the city

We also see stratification by family type. People with college
degrees are moving to high-density urban neighborhoods, and
working-class people are moving out. People without schoolage kids are moving in, and people with kids in school are
moving out.

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Jed Kolko ( http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/30/urban-revival-not-for-most-americans/)

The success and failure of American urbanism

What you're seeing here is an overall pattern in which the urban
revival is real but limited. There is increased demand to live in
high-density neighborhoods, but those neighborhoods do not

allow enough new construction for them to be affordable down

the income chain. Urban neighborhoods have also not provided
the kind of facilities, primarily schools and public safety, that
make them attractive for the parents of older children.
As a "business model" for America's cities, this kind of makes
sense.
Every time a two-bedroom apartment that used to house a
working-class mom and her two kids is replaced by a dualincome childless couple who use the spare bedroom as an
office/guest room, the city's tax base goes up and its need for
social spending goes down. Even as the office transforms into
a nursery, the fiscal situation remains far more favorable.
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If four or five years later the couple,having paid taxes for years
while consuming minimal social services, decamps for the
suburbs only to be replaced by a new DINK (dual income no
kids), then life is good. If they actually stuck around, the
dynamics wouldn't be as good.
But I've lived in high-density urban neighborhoods my whole
life, and I've never heard a voter or public official espouse the
goal of making their city a hostile place for poor people and
parents. People want or at least claim they want America's
newly thriving cities to be engines of economic opportunity.
But status quo policies are delivering the opposite result.

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