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The census figures, decade after decade, simply do not bear this out. The Portland singles mingle, they marry, and if they have children, they usually move out to Tigard, Beaverton, Clackamas, etc.
Doesn't mean the ALL move out, a city only needs to retain some of those that have children to have a functioning school system. Last time I checked all the schools in Portland have children in them so there parents must be living in the city.
Only the cities with high paying white collar jobs will revitalize.
People with kids actually are living in cities more, but it's mostly very rich people, and only certain cities.
What's interesting is that recent immigrants are choosing not to live in cities - they move directly to the suburbs.
As was said - some cities will continue change for the better. Mostly the cities on or near the 3 coasts with exceptions like Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, etc. OTOH, there are lot of hopeless smaller cities in the midwest and inland south that will probably only get worse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rzzzz
Only the cities with high paying white collar jobs will revitalize.
People with kids actually are living in cities more, but it's mostly very rich people, and only certain cities.
What's interesting is that recent immigrants are choosing not to live in cities - they move directly to the suburbs.
Immigrants who move here from the middle-class of their home countries (ie, mostly those who are here legally) move straight to the suburbs. Refugees and the (illegal) walk-ins are still mostly winding up in poorer, inner city neighborhoods or at least poorer parts of the suburbs.
It will only be certain cities, with certain characteristics. Any major city with functioning public transit is seeing revitalization, and will continue to do so. Medium sized cities that serve as regional hubs are seeing revitalization and will continue to do so (i.e. Indianapolis, Columbus OH, Austin). Smaller cities, or cities that are losing out to another nearby city, have a harder time revitalizing. I think that if they aren't improving already they're unlikely to see any improvements soon. I don't see cities like Akron or Buffalo as having very bright futures. If a city has lost it's amenities, services, and jobs it's very hard to make a comeback.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NickB1967
The census figures, decade after decade, simply do not bear this out. The Portland singles mingle, they marry, and if they have children, they usually move out to Tigard, Beaverton, Clackamas, etc.
It takes a lot of digging through census numbers to get a realistic idea of what is happening in this regard. General numbers like the population of children and public school enrollment numbers don't give a full picture. People are having fewer children in general, and higher levels of income and education are good indicators of a family with fewer children. Wealthier parents frequently chose private schools, so declining enrollment is not an accurate indicator of people staying or leaving (and there is little information on private school enrollment available at the local level).
I say this because I am seeing a lot more parents staying in Chicago than I did even just 5 years ago. The demand for new private schools is overwhelming. The decent public schools on the North and Northwest side are seeing an increased demand, and many that weren't desirable 10 years ago are very much in demand today. In order to track these changes you need to look at things like individual school test scores, income level changes by census tract, and number of children entering magnet and selective enrollment lotteries.
In many ways the question isn't just "will all cities revitalize" it's "will all parts of a city revitalize" (and the answer is no).
Don't forget empty nesters. Many of them are moving into the city to enjoy theater, nightlife, and other things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NickB1967
I sort of think of them as senior citizens.
There's often a gap between "empty-nesting" and becoming a senior citizen. Most people's kids are grown and out of the house well before they retire. IMO, "senior citizen-hood" doesn't really kick in till about age 70. Remember that we all have to work until 66-67 before we can collect full social security and there are some advantages to waiting until age 70.
That said, most seniors "retire in place", though some downsize.
It will only be certain cities, with certain characteristics. Any major city with functioning public transit is seeing revitalization, and will continue to do so. Medium sized cities that serve as regional hubs are seeing revitalization and will continue to do so (i.e. Indianapolis, Columbus OH, Austin). Smaller cities, or cities that are losing out to another nearby city, have a harder time revitalizing. I think that if they aren't improving already they're unlikely to see any improvements soon. I don't see cities like Akron or Buffalo as having very bright futures. If a city has lost it's amenities, services, and jobs it's very hard to make a comeback.
It takes a lot of digging through census numbers to get a realistic idea of what is happening in this regard. General numbers like the population of children and public school enrollment numbers don't give a full picture. People are having fewer children in general, and higher levels of income and education are good indicators of a family with fewer children. Wealthier parents frequently chose private schools, so declining enrollment is not an accurate indicator of people staying or leaving (and there is little information on private school enrollment available at the local level).
I say this because I am seeing a lot more parents staying in Chicago than I did even just 5 years ago. The demand for new private schools is overwhelming. The decent public schools on the North and Northwest side are seeing an increased demand, and many that weren't desirable 10 years ago are very much in demand today. In order to track these changes you need to look at things like individual school test scores, income level changes by census tract, and number of children entering magnet and selective enrollment lotteries.
In many ways the question isn't just "will all cities revitalize" it's "will all parts of a city revitalize" (and the answer is no).
Birmingham, AL is making a huge comeback. Too many developments to even remember/mention.
In the new Parkside district alone:
-Railroad Park (a very popular park that has basically created the new "Parkside" district. That was finished several years ago)
-The adjacent Region's Field (new baseball stadium that brought the Birmingham Barons back downtown from the suburbs and has had a ton of sold out crowds since it opened two years ago)
-Under construction next door is the Negro Souther League Museum
-Next door to that is an apartment building with around 350 units under construction
-One block away is another 300+ unit apartment building under construction
-The new "Rotary Trail" has broken ground (in the old railroad cut out)
-Another block away the new Intermodal Facility is under construction
-Across from that the old steam plant is being converted to a new public space
-The old Merita Bakery Factor is being converted to a multi-tenant restaurant and office space.
This is happening all over the city in various districts. It's truly a marvel to sit back and watch a city transform so dramatically before your eyes. I have live in many cities and have never seen such a dramatic change in 3 years. (The amount of time I've lived here.)
It's easy to see how public contributions have spurred private growth as well. (The Railroad Park and Region's Field were essentially the first investments in the area.) I don't think that all cities will make a comeback. As Hurricane said previously, it will take cities investing in infrastructure such as public transport but also public amenities.
I also think it's important that cities understand the value of preserving buildings and "recycling" them for a different use. It has worked wonders in Birmingham... To see an ugly old warehouse be reshaped into a modern thing of beauty that lends itself to Birmingham's industrial past. It give the city an identity as it modernizes.
I'm from Columbia, SC but live in the Montgomery, AL area currently and I've taken that drive up I-65N many times over the past year i've been here. Unlike here i can see why Birmingham lost city population for many years and now i can see why they are poised to regain them. While it's still some blighted areas I drove by downtown the bones of Birmingham are amazing and i'm glad they are turning it around. Now if only you could get some of that magic to rub off here Montgomery. They have a few projects here and there but most of the grow is in the Prattville suburb and also the East side of the area. They are a few upscale townhomes and etc being built up but in my honest opinion...until they place an emphasis on either remodeling or rebuilding the schools in this city i can't see any companies seriously looking to relocate to the area.
As for a mid sized Southern cities that are actually turning it around I can tell you that Columbia and Charleston are making great strides in doing so.
In Charleston they have revitalized much of the blighted areas and are in a full boom right now. At first it was mostly hotels [because of tourism], but gaining Boeing [and they are expanding already] has made everything in that metro area boom. Add to it the retires and that they have a decent educational base [College of Charleston, MUSC, Charleston Southern, the Citadel...several nationally ranked high schools and a military presence]
I'm actually impressed with what going on in my hometown of Columbia, SC. They currently have 42 project in construction right now that's about $1 billion in cost. That's not even all of them that are slated to begin this year or the next so it's really more than that. They are slated to begin construction on a minor league park to bring minor league baseball back to the city after nearly 20 year gap. It will be the centerpiece to a live, work, play type of area that's actually going to be downtown and not in the suburbs. Years ago they decided to invest in the abandoned warehouse district we called the Vista. Now the Vista is the main entertainment district with hotels, grocery stores, condos, restaurants and more and is still growing. The University of South Carolina is investing a lot downtown also [duh on me b/c that's where it's located] and they are working with the City to push forward the masterplan for the rivers downtown that will be truly world class if it stays with the plan. The Main St. area was sleepy and an empty after the office workers left at 5p but now that's changing fast. They have several restaurants, a theatre, new apartments/condos and etc and have a few more slated to come soon. One thing that had hurt Columbia over the years have been that it lacked representation of elected officials and it began to show. The upstate landed BMW and sparked that area while the next 2 focused on major project along the coast [Charleston got the new Ravel Bridge and Boeing out of this]. Everytime infrastructure needs came out...if one of the coastal cities whined about needing a new road or something they'd get it and Columbia's needs were pushed back. The county got tired of it and allowed the citizens to vote on a penny tax to improve the roads, parks and etc and it's gained more money than estimated so far. They also passed bond referendums over the years to redo and rebuild mostly every school in the area while actually building several new schools in the process also. I can honestly say that Columbia is sneaking into possibly catapulting itself up out of a sleepy government/military/college town area and into something special. It has truly changed from when i was young, dumb and you know the rest.
As was said - some cities will continue change for the better. Mostly the cities on or near the 3 coasts with exceptions like Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, etc. OTOH, there are lot of hopeless smaller cities in the midwest and inland south that will probably only get worse.
Immigrants who move here from the middle-class of their home countries (ie, mostly those who are here legally) move straight to the suburbs. Refugees and the (illegal) walk-ins are still mostly winding up in poorer, inner city neighborhoods or at least poorer parts of the suburbs.
I don't think you're giving most of those Midwest cities their proper due...depending upon what you think of as small. It's not just the Twin Cities and Chicago. Just about every major city in the region is experiencing steady progress in its urban core. The newer cities with a bit less industrial baggage like Columbus, Indianapolis, and KC are. You could throw in Omaha and Des Moines too. Both are doing very well. Most of the industrial cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Milwaukee are too. If you want to extend the definition to traditional Rust Belt, add Buffalo and Pittsburgh as well. Detroit is anybody's guess. I've lived the changed in my old neighborhood in Chicago and I'm living them now in St. Louis. If you told the 22 year old me (when I was going to school in STL) that I would live in the two neighborhoods we've lived in over the last couple years, I would have thought you were crazy. Or I would have thought that future me must have made some really awful choices in life and that I must be running a meth lab or something in the year 2015.
The big difference is the speed at which those cities are revitalizing and the point at which they hit the bottom. Philly/Baltimore revitalization is much slower than DC, NYC, and Boston. It's probably a Chicago minus (or double minus) rate of change. It's still occurring though. The Midwest cities I mentioned are probably changing at a Philly or Baltimore minus rate. The rate difference boils down to lower prevalence of high wage positions and the availability of land on the periphery of each metro. The other difference is when neighborhoods adjacent to the urban cores "hit bottom". In Chicago, that was probably mid 80s for the near northwest side, near west side, and a lot of areas immediately north of Wrigley. In STL, it was probably mid-90s. The idea of people buying up lofts in beautiful old warehouses was pretty much a novelty in 1995 here and downtown was completely dead at night. What we're probably going to see in these cities over the next 20 years is an increasingly stable and attractive core that contains most of the more walkable and historic areas that managed to survive the last fifty years...transit or not. Transit here isn't great. I drive to work. But that's 3 miles away in light traffic with cheap parking. 3 miles away from work in a larger city without strong transit is a huge inconvenience. Here, it's not awful. I'm no more than 10-15 minutes by car from the best stuff the region has to offer (U-City, DT, historic areas, Forest Park, anything really). Areas outside of this convenience zone are that lack the walkable/bikable neighborhood elements are going to struggle though. There will be a ring of poverty that separates the well off urban portion from the affluent and middle class suburbs.
The areas that I expect to struggle are those cities that are a notch below these that lack major universities: Dayton, Akron, Toledo, Youngstown, Terre Haute, Flint, etc. Metros of this size that lack a flagship academic institution in the middle of the country are pretty much toast.
I don't think you're giving most of those Midwest cities their proper due...depending upon what you think of as small. It's not just the Twin Cities and Chicago. Just about every major city in the region is experiencing steady progress in its urban core. The newer cities with a bit less industrial baggage like Columbus, Indianapolis, and KC are. You could throw in Omaha and Des Moines too. Both are doing very well. Most of the industrial cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Milwaukee are too. If you want to extend the definition to traditional Rust Belt, add Buffalo and Pittsburgh as well. Detroit is anybody's guess. I've lived the changed in my old neighborhood in Chicago and I'm living them now in St. Louis. If you told the 22 year old me (when I was going to school in STL) that I would live in the two neighborhoods we've lived in over the last couple years, I would have thought you were crazy. Or I would have thought that future me must have made some really awful choices in life and that I must be running a meth lab or something in the year 2015.
The big difference is the speed at which those cities are revitalizing and the point at which they hit the bottom. Philly/Baltimore revitalization is much slower than DC, NYC, and Boston. It's probably a Chicago minus (or double minus) rate of change. It's still occurring though. The Midwest cities I mentioned are probably changing at a Philly or Baltimore minus rate. The rate difference boils down to lower prevalence of high wage positions and the availability of land on the periphery of each metro. The other difference is when neighborhoods adjacent to the urban cores "hit bottom". In Chicago, that was probably mid 80s for the near northwest side, near west side, and a lot of areas immediately north of Wrigley. In STL, it was probably mid-90s. The idea of people buying up lofts in beautiful old warehouses was pretty much a novelty in 1995 here and downtown was completely dead at night. What we're probably going to see in these cities over the next 20 years is an increasingly stable and attractive core that contains most of the more walkable and historic areas that managed to survive the last fifty years...transit or not. Transit here isn't great. I drive to work. But that's 3 miles away in light traffic with cheap parking. 3 miles away from work in a larger city without strong transit is a huge inconvenience. Here, it's not awful. I'm no more than 10-15 minutes by car from the best stuff the region has to offer (U-City, DT, historic areas, Forest Park, anything really). Areas outside of this convenience zone are that lack the walkable/bikable neighborhood elements are going to struggle though. There will be a ring of poverty that separates the well off urban portion from the affluent and middle class suburbs.
The areas that I expect to struggle are those cities that are a notch below these that lack major universities: Dayton, Akron, Toledo, Youngstown, Terre Haute, Flint, etc. Metros of this size that lack a flagship academic institution in the middle of the country are pretty much toast.
I think we will see an increase of light rail and streetcar lines in a number of these cities to help boost their attractiveness to similar size competing cities.
I think what we will start seeing in this country is the people who want that big city, NYC or SF, lifestyle but can't afford to live in those places, so they turn to the next best thing and start to make smaller big cities and medium size cities more of a hotspot destination to live and work.
Plus, it isn't like our population is shrinking.
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