Originally Posted: Feb. 5, 2019
Adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to problem solving is almost never a good policy. What works well in one context could be precisely the wrong thing to do in another. Use an axe to cut down a massive tree; use a scalpel to conduct a delicate surgery. Switching one for the other produces dramatically different results. When it comes to cities and revitalization, this absolutely rings true.
I was fortunate to be a part of a fantastic symposium last week, called Policies to Promote Inclusive Urban Growth. It was held in Dallas at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University, and the event also served as the public release of a report which I worked on, Beyond Gentrification: Towards More Equitable Urban Growth, published by the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (If you get a chance I encourage you to check out the video of the event, found at the first link above). The report took a look a recent development activity and their impacts in three very different cities: Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas. Each city has had some measure of urban success, but each has had significant failures that, if left unaddressed, threaten the very future of the cities. And unlike the general prescription given to cities today (“Do what worked for New York and Silicon Valley! Rely on technology, financial services, and eds and meds! Attract the creative class! Build more housing where people want it to make it affordable!”), the report found that each city may have a unique prescription for a path to success.
Chicago, for example, is a city of contradictions. It’s becoming wealthier while simultaneously increasing its impoverished areas. It’s becoming exceedingly expensive and astonishingly vacant, more educated and less educated, all at the same time. How so? The city has drawn in and concentrated affluent new residents along the city’s beautiful lakefront, but there’s been continual decline in many of the city’s neighborhoods, particularly on the South and West sides. It’s become the prime example of a bifurcated city, gaining high-income and retaining low-income residents, while squeezing out those in the middle. This has most directly impacted Chicago’s black middle class living on the South and West sides, leading to a decline of the city’s black population by 25% since 2000. Chicago’s concentration of revitalization is a concern.
Los Angeles is faced with very different challenges. Unlike monocentric Chicago, Los Angeles is polycentric and disperse and is confronting its challenges across the region. L.A. is one of a select group of regions nationwide that are in the midst of a housing affordability crisis, much of it triggered by massive foreign real estate speculation (something not seen in Chicago or Dallas) and by restrictive land use policies. According to the research in the report, actual gentrification, or the shift of low-income areas into high-income areas, has been rare. But as home prices have become stratospheric, more and more Angelenos are finding homeownership unattainable and are forced to rent, or, worse yet, find themselves homeless despite having well-paying jobs. The result is a region that is losing its ability to transfer wealth through homeownership, and has a tension similar to being under siege.
Dallas, however, is well into its fourth decade of an economic boom. Following the real estate and oil crash of the 1980’s, Dallas has transformed itself and become a prominent destination in the nation’s middle. With acres of land available for development to keep housing prices low, Dallas lacks the high prices of Los Angeles. It does not suffer from the kind of gentrification evident in Los Chicago or Los Angeles. But, like Chicago, its growth hasn’t been equitably distributed. Dallas was the first Texas city to impose racial housing segregation in 1916, leading it to become a bifurcated city that drew sharp social and economic lines between its northern and southern regions. The legacy of those policies continue today, even as explicit segregation ended nearly 50 years ago. A strong argument can be made that the policies of the last century have hindered social and economic mobility – leading to less growth than Dallas otherwise would have had. READ MORE