(More about) The ephemeral city: what is a city to do?

Michael Jonas writes an op-ed in the Boston Globe, "There goes the neighborhood: As middle-class families with children leave Boston in droves, are we becoming what author Joel Kotkin calls an 'ephemeral city'?" as an opportunity to reflect on demographic change in Boston--the same kinds of issues we are dealing with in DC.

I don't really like Joel Kotkin's anti-city agenda. I don't think he can criticize cities too much for being caught up in the realities of "the exchange value of place." What's happening has to happen in strong market cities, given the limited amount of land, and the kind of people who want to partake of the city experience. This will happen as long as property taxes are based on current value of the land. Families get priced out.

Now which are strong market cities: DC, Boston, Manhattan, some parts of Brooklyn, San Francisco. I don't know about Seattle--I mean, I know it's a strong market, but I think there are still plenty of opportunities. There are plenty of lower-cost housing opportunities in Portland, despite the scads of new and expensive housing being developed in The Pearl District and Riverplace.

The remaining traditional center cities, well, it's not an issue... such cities have room for millions of new households.

The part about Kotkin criticizing rust belt cities for focusing on creative class efforts and not becoming San Francisco overnight--I covered that in the blog entry "More crap from Joel Kotkin" in March.

Still, there are some tough and important issues to grapple with. We do need to make things. We do need to be innovative.

Lousy schools don't help us build our creative capacity. Neither do failures to think more broadly in terms of developing new forms of urban-based industry for the 21st Century, such as how I have written about manufacturing transit vehicles or leveraging the building trades and preservation arts for light industrial-residential revitalization.

See Use it or lose it or you have to recreate it (US streetcar technology and expertise).

Also see the previously undisclosed proposal for the Ivy City Community Development Corporation, here: Fixing Cities.
_______
For more about the phenomenon of "super gentrification," if you have access to Urban Studies Journal, check out:

Super-gentrification: the case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City, Loretta Lees.
Volume 40, Number 12 / November 2003

Abstract: This paper is an empirical examination of the process of 'super-gentrification' in the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood of New York City. This intensified regentrification is happening in a few select areas of global cities like London and New York that have become the focus of intense investment and conspicuous consumption by a new generation of super-rich 'financifiers' fed by fortunes from the global finance and corporate service industries. This latest resurgence of gentrification can be distinguished from previous rounds of revitalisation and poses important questions about the historical continuity of current manifestations of gentrification with previous generations of neighbourhood change.

My only comment is that super-gentrification isn't just a function of rich 'fnanciers' but more a function of the global real estate market. Rich is relative.

And this article, also by Professor Lees:

A reappraisal of gentrification: towards a ‘geography of gentrification’
Progress in Human Geography, Volume 24, Number 3, 1 September 2000, pp. 389-408(20)

Abstract: The gentrification literature since the mid-1990s is reappraised in light of the emergence of processes of post-recession gentrification and in the face of recent British and American urban policy statements that tout gentrification as the cure-all for inner-city ills. Some tentative suggestions are offered on how we might re-energize the gentrification debate. Although real analytical progress has been made there are still ‘wrinkles’ which research into the ‘geography’ of gentrification could address: 1) financifiers - super-gentrification; 2) third-world immigration - the global city; 3) black/ethnic minority gentrification - race and gentrification; and 4) liveability/urban policy - discourse on gentrification. In addition, context, temporality and methodology are argued to be important issues in an updated and rigorous deconstruction of not only the process of gentrification itself but also discourses on gentrification.

Note that I distinguish between neighborhood investment and gentrification. Gentrification happens when there are no programs in place to mitigate the impact of the globalization of the local real estate market and an unfettered and inexorable focus on "the exchange value of place."

Index Keywords: arts-culture; urban-revitalization