Urban Inversion
The New Republic has an interesting article on the way cities in the past twenty years or so have found their central cores filling up with rich people, while the poor displaced by the resulting higher prices are moving out into the suburbs. (The Atlantic had a story on the same theme, “The Next Slum?” in its March 2008 issue.) The phenomenon is a bit frightening to me, as I have always preferred living in cities to living in the suburbs, and have never in my life run the risk of being described as “affluent.” I think it’s certainly a good thing to encourage density, street-level retail, public transportation and all the other New Urbanist recommendations in central cities. But I wonder if there’s not a way to do so that could also allow teachers, nurses, waiters, and artists—important but not (usually) lucrative jobs—to live there, too. (Taxing rich people at a higher rate seems an obvious solution, though my social democratic tendencies are at war with my distrust of government on this issue. I would like to see greater income equality, but I’m not comfortable with giving our federal government such a giant windfall.) All the high-rises going up in Austin, for instance, are luxury high-rises. If rich people live in them rather than in McMansions built on pristine suburban land, I suppose that’s a good thing. But if cities become playgrounds only for the rich, they will lose much of the diversity of population and activity that made them interesting in the first place. Perhaps in thirty years, children who grew up in cities will lament their sterile surroundings and seek out the gritty reality of places like Windy Ridge, North Carolina.