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Seems to me that specific trendy neighborhoods are doing very well, but this is not the case in far more areas than the die hard urbanists are willing to admit. Just as many neighborhoods are not aging well at all and are in substantially worse shape than 20 years ago. It's no secret that the middle class is fading away in America. Some of their neighborhoods have gentrified. Others are going the other way.
A year ago, I would have said "yes", but I'm not so sure. When we talk about cities doing well, what we're talking about is an influx of development in some areas catering to really rich people and a young transient population of childless folks. Income equality is at an all time high and the urban poor and working class continue to their prospects and spending power decline while the middle class(with children) is squeezed out to the suburbs.
Some cities are doing well, while others continue to lose citizens by the thousands, such as Chicago, whose current population is roughly where it was in 1920 according to the US Census, having lost over 200,000 citizens between 2000-10 according to the Chicago Tribune.
Yes - this is the resurgence of cities across North America. The 21st Century will be the century of the city and it's just getting started. Every day, cities get better, more attractive, drawing in more people and more resources and creating a positive feedback loop that will be transformative. By the middle of the 20th Century cities will be looking at how to remove the last vestiges of the era of decay and neglect by the so-called Greatest Generation and the self-indulgent Boomers of America's most important resource.
Unfortunately two complete generations led cities to the near ruinous lows of the 80's and 90's and it took massive efforts to at first just keep them alive and then slowly nurse them back to a semblance of health. Now, momentum is just beginning to be built and GenX and Millennials will piece by piece dismantle the wastelands left to us and rebuild into the magnificent places our great grand parents imagined they could be.
It's a wonderful time to be an urbanist and my only regret is that I will only be able to see the early stages of this transformation and won't be around in the latter half of this century to see the truly marvelous transformation be complete.
Now, momentum is just beginning to be built and GenX and Millennials will piece by piece dismantle the wastelands left to us and rebuild into the magnificent places our great grand parents imagined they could be.
Leave Generation X out of it. We'll just sit back and sneer at Millennials the way we sneered at everything else (It's sort of our specialty, though some Millennials make it so easy). The Twentieth Century was the century of the city in the US, both the rise and the decline. Cities are on the rise now, but they're nearing a local maximum. Millennials will realize (and some are realizing) that all this walking and public transport stuff is fine when you're young and single, but it isn't so great when you're dragging kids around. They'll realize that a 500 sq foot studio is great when you're eating out every night but not so good when you're trying to house a family. They'll realize that sure, they've got all the bars and shows they want, but any activity which requires space is either unavailable or is both expensive and inconvenient.
And so they'll try to move out to the suburbs. And in some places, they'll find the policies they championed mean the spaces they want are no longer available. And Generation X will sit back in our suburban homes, and cackle madly.
^^ Except for the fact that a rather large number of millennials are choosing not to have kids to drag around.
They may have them later than the Boomers did, but I think most of them will have kids. If people weren't strongly driven to have children, we'd have gone extinct some time ago.
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