The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

Alan Ehrenhalt has written a fascinating account what he calls a recent "demographic inversion" - not, thank you, "gentrification" - in which immigrants now tend to enter American society via the suburbs rather than the core city, the poor abandon or are driven from the core city into the suburbs via loss of livelihood, taxes, and buyouts, and those who can afford it take up residence in the urban core for entertainment, social amenities, and quicker commutes. Ehrenhalt provides a variety of different takes on the ways in which this process is unfolding, to varying degrees of success, in exemplary urban neighborhoods - Chicago's Sheffield, Brooklyn's Bushwick, Cleveland Heights, Gwinnett County northeast of Atlanta, and many more, all related in clear, felicitous prose.Among my favorite chapters were those in which Ehrenhalt chronicled and assessed the fall and rise of the Clarendon section of Arlington, brought about by the by arrival of Vietnamese shop and restaurant owners to properties emptied out by the disorder and loss of business due to Metro construction, and the continuing death spiral of the urban shipwreck that is Philadelphia, or, as some locals call it, "Bostroit," for its unique 18th-century core in close proximity to areas of utter blight, drug dens, and boarded up row houses, all a result of the rapid post-industrial loss of manufacturing and port services. And yes, sports fans, Ehrenhalt lingers for a while on an aspect of Philly most of you will recognize, as "the only large American city in which no one is surprised when parade watchers boo Santa Claus, where fans boo their sports teams for failing to win a second consecutive championship, or where grandmothers at the stadium insult spectators who happen to be wearing the wrong jersey." In Ehrenhalt's account, the cities that are gaining ground in the postindustrial world are cosmopolitan and diverse, and for the most part tolerant; Philadelphia, on the other hand, strikes the author and his Philly sources as provincial, parochial, and hyperlocally intolerant - for good and explicable historical reasons.Although the numbers don't quite line up exactly as Ehrenhalt might wish - between the last two censuses, more people still migrated to the suburbs than to the cities, and in many urban areas that are repopulating, the downtown contingents are still relatively small - the trends he describes nevertheless seem well underway. And some of of what he discusses is wondrous strange and surprising, including the populating of the NY financial district, where, following 9/11 and then in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, developers repurposed as condos hundreds of office buildings, their occupants having fled to New Jersey and elsewhere in NY and Connecticut. Now, in the area south of Chambers Street, where the 1970 census recorded only 833 residents and which every NY urbanist viewed as the neighborhood least likely to EVER be viewed as residential - Jane Jacobs devoted several pages of "Death and Life" to mocking the very notion - more than 60,000 people, drawn in part by post-9/11 and post-meltdown incentives, are now living. And on Sunday there are couples with strollers!Our contemporary Zeitgeist is urban - just look at the numbers of city books now cluttering the book reviews and (remaining) bookstore shelves - and, lured by entertainment, nightlife, and the hum of the city, an entire generation is going to the towns we boomers evacuated for the suburbs. The question, of course, is, "will the Millennials raise their children there?" I think so. I would. (How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, etc.?) And what about the suburbs? When I look around the suburban neighborhoods of northern Virginia, from which evidence Ehrenhalt supports his case, I see confirmation: the urban spaces are repopulating with people having more disposable income, the DC metro inner suburbs are hyperethnic, the suburban spaces are building urban amenities ("town-centers"). Meanwhile, the tract-home New Jersey neighborhood I grew up in, which contained NO - count them, NO - persons of color, is now fully international and delightfully diverse (and, in support of Ehrehalt's major argument, crumbling as well). My home borough has growing South Asian, East Asian, and Hispanic populations, all of whom are reflected in the multi-lingual signage of local main streets.The book's brief final chapter is, sadly, weak on informed prognostication, apart from the crowning observation that we should expect more of the same. For me, however, that doesn't undermine the brilliance of the foregoing text or the empirical validity of the case studies.In short, the main lines of The Great Inversion ring true to me, and I found Ehrenhalt's monograph essential reading as I seek to get my arms around city dynamics, trendlines, issues, politics, and constituencies.

I'm halfway through the book. It's engaging and insightful, sure. There is one thing, perhaps an editing error, perhaps more, has left a bad taste in my mouth: a substantial error in geographical reference. In a discussion about Chicago's relationship to Lake Michigan, he contrasts the Windy City to other places, one being my home town of Detroit. Not to exaggerate, but Mr. Ehrenhalt misplaces a Great Lake - and yes, I say misplace and not confuse - saying that the City of Detroit (not region, not a proxy for Bruce Katz's "Metro's") has not realized uses of Lake Huron like Chicago has Lake Michigan. A quick look at a map will tell you that Lake Huron is much further north from Detroit and should not be confused with the Detroit River, the strait between Lake St. Clair to the north and Lake Erie to the south that divides the US from Canada and the actual body of water that borders the City of Detroit. (A very small portion of the City lies on Lake St. Clair. Very small.) I have not been able to shake, nor should I forgive, this error. This book contains deep dives into neighborhoods with hundreds of geographical references - street names, businesses, etc. Mr. Ehrenhalt tells a great story about these places but I can't help but wonder how accurate any of it is when you misplace a 23,000 square foot lake, saying it is somewhere where it isn't. And using an incorrect reference, he ends up literally comparing apples to oranges - Chicago and Lake Michigan to Detroit and the Detroit River, bodies of water that impact these cities in very different ways. I'm still giving this book three stars because of the way it is written and subject matter, but I can't say I'm not disappointed that this known urbanist and his editors didn't catch this (particularly at a time where Detroit is catching a lot of attention in national media and among urban policy wonks). I'd love for readers in the neighborhoods named in the book to do a thorough fact check. While I'm not opposed to the premise of this book or the figures to support this broader change discussed, I'm certainly taking the neighborhood-level view with a grain of salt. You should too.

I'm always suspicious of books that tell me what I want to hear -- in this case that central cities are becoming more popular than distant suburbs in metropolitan areas across the country. Ehrenhalt makes his case effectively but also qualifies his position with opposing arguments and acknowledgment of the uncertainty that surrounds any predictions. The author uses a diverse array of cities as case studies, and he deserves praise for being one of the few urbanist authors to write about Phoenix in a way that is balanced and accurate. He rightly identifies the city's strengths (e.g. its extraordinarily successful light rail line) and its weaknesses (e.g. the unreasonable expectation of ubiquitous free parking) and blends them to reach an informed conclusion free of the smug condescension and gratuitous derision that mars many other writings about Phoenix.