Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz
and streetcars shaped urbanization in the East and Midwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The automobile welded together the components of Los Angeles, which led all other American cities in automobile registration and use in the 1920s. As Los Angeles’s outer counties surpassed Los Angeles County in population growth during the last decades of the twentieth century, they inspired a new urban vocabulary: “regional urbanization,” “exopolis,” “flexcity.” Both the Philadelphia and Los Angeles regions, however, remain highly segregated by class, race, and ethnicity. In the Delaware Valley, segregation still largely follows the old model of the Chicago School of sociology. Lower- and middle- income minorities live in row houses and publicly subsidized housing in the inner cities and inner-ring suburbs. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of Philadelphia’s white middle class departed for the suburbs, with minorities composing the majority—45 percent white, 43 percent black, 5 percent Asian, and 7 percent Hispanic. The city of Philadelphia is much more diverse than its region, whose minorities remain concentrated at its center.
The Chicago School model does not apply to Southern California. After World War II, African Americans created what has been called the nation’s “first large suburban ghetto” in South Central Los Angeles. In East Los Angeles, poor Mexicans live in detached, single-family, ranch- style homes more characteristic of suburbs than cities. The ethnic clusters known as Koreatown, Little Saigon, and a new Chinatown are distinctively suburban in population density and housing styles. At the same time, freeways, airports, and manufacturing corridors separate the suburbs populated by middle- and upper-income white workers in Orange, Ventura, and western Los Angeles County from South Central and East Los Angeles. “Los Angeles in the 1960s,” urbanist Robert Gottlieb and his colleagues write, “represented an unusual mix of urban decline and suburban expansion, to the point that Los Angeles appeared to lose any appearance of the classical ‘city.’ ”16 Philadelphia represents a city surrounded by suburbs, Los Angeles a product of “suburban urbanization,” where center and periphery meld into sprawling cities that lack a meaningful center. The stark contrasts between Philadelphia and Los Angeles—their diverse regional histories, economic and demographic differences, and divergent social ecologies—pose an unavoidable question: In early twenty-first-century America, just what is a city?
Three Transformations
Despite their differences, Philadelphia and Los Angeles experienced the common transformations of economy, demography, and space that have resulted in new American cities. The decimation of manufacturing evident in Philadelphia and other Rust Belt cities resulted from both the growth of foreign industries, notably electronics and automobiles, and the corporate search for cheaper labor. Cities with economic sectors other than manufacturing (such as banking, commerce, medicine, government, and education) withstood deindustrialization most successfully—for example, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Chicago, Boston, and Houston. Those with no alternatives—Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, Detroit—nearly collapsed. Others—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Twin Cities—struggled with mixed success. Cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and in some ways New Orleans built economies on entertainment, hospitality, and retirement. As services replaced manufacturing everywhere, office towers became the late twentieth century’s urban factories. A broad category, ser vice embraces both demanding and rewarding jobs and low-wage, non-unionized employment that offers few benefits. In fortunate cities such as Los Angeles, new economic functions included the production of the financial and business services and products that served the emergent international economy. They also included, again notably in Los Angeles, the reappearance of small-scale manufacturing drawing on inexpensive immigrant labor.17
Increasingly, “anchor institutions,” notably “eds and meds,” also sustained the economies of fortunate cities by becoming their principal employers. Late in the twentieth century in the nation’s twenty largest cities, “eds and meds” provided nearly 35 percent of jobs.18 These institutions—fixed in place, partnering with government, business, and civic sectors—hire thousands of workers and pump massive amounts of money through urban systems. They are often the largest employers in the cities in which they are located. And they have grown in size while manufacturing industries have failed or decamped. “Eds and Meds,” concludes a 2009 report to HUD secretary Shaun Donovan by the Penn Institute for Urban Research, “are playing a crucial role in the economic vitality and competitiveness of their cities and surrounding regions. . . . Across the country, many Eds and Meds are the largest employers in their cities and also fuel local economies through construction dollars and the purchase of goods and services.”19
The first urban demographic transformation was the migration of African Americans from the South to northern and midwestern, and even, to some extent, western cities. (As James Gregory has shown, in the same years more than twice as many white southerners also moved to the North and Midwest.)20 From World War I to 1920, between seven hundred thousand and one million African Americans moved north, followed by another eight hundred thousand during the 1920s and five million more between 1940 and 1970. The results, of course, were profound. San Francisco’s black population multiplied nearly twenty-five times between 1940 and 1970 while Chicago’s grew five times, to take two examples. As African Americans moved into cities, whites moved out. Between 1950 and 1970, the overall population of American cities grew by ten million people, and the population of suburbs grew by eighty-five million.
As Herbert Gans’s classic The Levittowners showed, even more than racial change, a severe urban housing shortage, a desire to escape urban congestion, and mass-produced suburban homes made affordable by federally insured, long-term, low-interest mortgages pulled whites from cities, where they sped to their suburban homes along the new interstate highway system.21 However, aggressive and often unscrupulous realtors, fanning fears of racial change, played a role as well.22 In the North and Midwest, the number of African American newcomers often did not equal the number of whites who left. As a result, city populations and density went down, returning swaths of inner cities to empty lots and weed-filled fields where once working-class housing and factories had stood—a process vividly captured by the great photographer Camilo José Vergara, who has documented the emergence of the “green ghetto” in Rust Belt America, where urban agriculture has emerged as a growth industry.23 In the Sun Belt, in cities such as Los Angeles, population trends went in the opposite direction. Between 1957 and 1990, the Sun Belt’s urban population, lured by economic opportunity and an appealing climate and boosted by annexation as well as in-migration, climbed from 8.5 to 23 million.
Massive immigration following changes to federal law in 1965 also transformed urban demography. Immigration was the human face of the economic globalization transforming cities around the world.24 More immigrants entered the United States in the 1990s than in any other decade in its history. Three facts about this immigration stand out as especially important. First, it was diverse. Mostly from Asia and Latin America, immigrants altered the ethnic mix of America’s population, most notably of its cities. They fueled most of the urban population growth that occurred during the 1990s.25
Four of five immigrants settled in metropolitan areas, clustering in “gateway” cities: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and to some extent, Chicago. By 2000, although still clustered, they had begun to spread out across the nation, transforming suburbs and small as well as large cities. In 1910, 84 percent of the foreign-born in Greater Philadelphia lived in the central city. By 2006, the number had plummeted to 35 percent. Similar trends occurred everywhere. Across the nation, the suburbanization of immigration had become a major factor reshaping metropolitan geography. This suburbanization of immigration is the second important fact. Thanks to labor market networks in agricultural work, construction, landscaping, low-end manufacturing, and domestic service, Hispanics, in fact, spread out faster than any other ethnic group in American history.26
The third fact about the new immigration is that it is essential. In New York City, immigration accounted for all of the population growth in the 1990s. In his testimony before New York’s City Council Committees on Small Business and Immigration, Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, reported on research which “concluded that immigrant entrepreneurs have become an increasingly powerful economic engine for New York City . . .