Proposal for Wilmington

Demographic Inversion

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

NB: Most white populations in large cities are liberals so blame the liberals for pushing the brown people out of range of their jobs and making their life more difficult for their own convenience.

A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown...

No American city looks like Vancouver at the moment. But quite a few are moving in this direction. Demographic inversions of one sort or another are occurring in urban pockets scattered all across America, many of them in seemingly unlikely places. Charlotte, North Carolina, is in the midst of a downtown building boom dominated by new mixed-use high-rise buildings, with office space on the bottom and condos or rental units above. Even at a moment of economic weakness, the condos are still selling briskly.

Take heed Wilmington. Your downtown is a horrible mess. People bought those places at the Riverfront because it's the closest thing to a downtown Wilmington address one can have and still do stuff without having to drive all over creation.

Having lived in Charlotte for several years I can actually offer informed comment on this one. When I arrived for my new job I decided to take a trial run to the office to get myself familiar with the route and gauge how much time it would take to get to the office. It was a Saturday and figured I'd park and walk around a bit. I made it to work in about 15 minutes and found a ghost town. Everything, literally everything, was closed. Even the parking garages were closed. There was no need to stay open as there way nobody there but me. My plans to have lunch were quickly dashed. I walked around aimlessly for a while and finally gave up and went back to the house. Much to my surprise it took me 40 minutes to get to work on Monday and parking was a fiasco. By the time I was leaving a few years later the smart developers had stripped the old Barclay's building to the frame and were making it into condos. Charlotte has wisely opted for a large number of mixed use buildings. ARE YOU LISTENING MAYOR BAKER?

So, this means the suburbs are abandoned in Chicago? No.

We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

New Urbanism is ascendant once again. Look at the suburban version here in Delaware; Parkside. Taking this idea and moving it to an urban environment is the goal. Make the city walkable, accessable to families and business. That means, mixed use residential and retail next to office and green space. Give urban dwellers the ability to walk to work, the grocery store and a decent sized park and people will gladly move there.

In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium is scheduled for construction this year that will allow residents to drive their cars into a garage elevator, ride up to the floor they live on, and park right next to their front door. I have a hard time figuring out whether that is a triumph for urbanism or a defeat. But my guess is that, except in Manhattan, the carless life has yet to achieve any significant traction in the affluent new enclaves of urban America.

I call it a triumph. It's the car that you need but don't use unless you need to. Would you rather walk 10 minutes to the office or spend an hour in traffic?

The evidence from most American cities--carefully presented by Christopher Leinberger, the real estate developer and University of Michigan urban planning professor, in his recent book, The Option of Urbanism--suggests that the number of downtown residents these days depends more on supply than demand. Few in Charlotte dispute that, if there were 30,000 upscale residential units in the center of that city, there would be 30,000 people living in them before long. The residential population of lower Manhattan has not just increased substantially since 2001; it has all but exploded in the last 18 months. And the strollers have reached Wall Street. Take a walk down there some Saturday morning, and you will see for yourself.

Ironically, Wall Street is the other place I stayed for a length of time when I was commuting to NYC from Delaware. (Yes that sucks as much as you think). The worst part was getting back to the phonebooth sized corporate apartment after work and absolutely everything is closed. You want to eat? Better get a cab. (I'm starting to think I'm leaving a wake of New Urbanism wherever I go.) As for Charlotte, you better believe that 30,000 people would gladly live downtown. The city is very compact and north east of the city gets very bad very quickly. Every other direction is a mess. Whole sections could be razed and rebuilt as mixed use space.

Paris was a different story. It had always had a substantial inner-city working class, the breeding ground for political unrest and violence over and over again in French history. But the narrow streets that housed the Parisian poor were largely obliterated in the urban redesign dictated by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The Paris that Haussmann created was the city of fashionable inner-ring boulevards that remains largely intact a century and a half later. The poor and the newly arrived were essentially banished to the suburbs--where they remain today, though they are now mostly Muslims from North Africa rather than peasants from the south of France.

Nobody in his right mind would hold up the present-day arrangement of metropolitan Paris, with its thousands of unemployed immigrants seething in shoddily built suburban high-rise housing projects, as a model for what twenty-first-century urbanism ought to look like. Indeed, in the worst case, demographic inversion would result in the poor living out of sight and largely forgotten in some new kind of high-rise projects beyond the city border, with the wealthy huddled in gated enclaves in the center.

Therein lies the danger. Done wrong this is Paris. Done right this is Vienna. Graduating the cost and mixing the sizes and options for housing block by block would help even out the disparities. Even that might not be enough to make housing affordable for lower income families without Section 8 housing.

As the central-city population continues to grow, so will the demand for skyscrapers--something cities are sure initially to resist. Nor does it seem likely that exurbia will turn into a wasteland. The price of the houses will go down and render them more attractive for newcomers trying to rise in the U.S. economy and society. Urbanists have complained for years that immigrants and poor people in the inner city have a hard time commuting to the service jobs that are available to them in the suburbs. If they live in the suburbs, they will be closer to the jobs. Transportation will remain a problem, but not one that can't be solved.

The author shares my view that the transportation issue is one that is problematic. However, I think there will be quite a bit of market generated equilibium. If you do have people moving in large numbers into the city center you'll see a decrease in road traffic which will make transportation manageable.

Can Wilmington lure builders into the city limits to create some sort of walkable city? Currently the main problem is that the city is split in two by 95. that makes Wilmington into a city like Budapest but they have the Danube instead of I95. There was a proposal a few years ago to turn 95 into a tunnel under Wilmington by building a series of parks and neighborhoods on top. Frankly the idea is genius. The cost is currently prohibitive but finding a builder who would take the risk in return for a huge tax break would be very smart indeed.

What say you?