I have been reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 city planning classic, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Drawing mostly on her experiences of metropolitan New York, the book discusses common characteristics, not of "gentrified" civic areas, but of endogenously created "healthy city neighborhoods." The book's arguments and examples have, in places, clearly aged since 1961; its essentially seditious character hasn't.
"Death and Life's" core premise, that those closest to a problem, given resources to do so, are the ones best able to solve it, applies more broadly than just to city planning; it is a cornerstone progressive value. Jacobs argues that public housing projects, for example, fail and become magnets for crime, because the big-city governments that develop and maintain them discount this basic truth.
Maybe the book has grabbed me because of its spotlight on compact city living, in the throes of the current oil shortage. Maybe it's that the discussion of the paternalistic veneer of government, wholly corrupted by the interests of big wealth, rings eerily contemporary to me. There's one passage, though, from the book's remarkable chapter, "Unslumming and Slumming," that has especially haunted me:
City officials today prate about 'bringing back the middle class,' as if nobody were in the middle class until he had left the city and acquired a ranch house and a barbecue and thereby become precious. To be sure, cities are losing their middle class populations. However, cities need not 'bring back' a middle class, and carefully protect it, like an artificial growth. Cities grow the middle class.
I was raised in the 70s and 80s, not exactly in a suburb, but in an affluent coastal resort town, home to mostly white people--like my family. In my childhood and teens, I believed that "the big city" (we were closest to San Francisco) was fun to visit occasionally, but how could anyone in their right mind want to live there? Peel off its veneer of excitement, and any city was a pricey, cramped hotbed of crime and filth, where you'd have to live near people very, um, different from yourself--a hellhole. My vague prejudices, I think, were shared by most "mainstream" Americans born after World War II; they were deliberately promulgated by the powerful oil industry and others with a vested interest in the growth of thinly populated driving-dependent areas.
I didn't much question my vague disdain of cities. But I harbored other, more matter-of-fact beliefs about cities too, too, assumptions supported in our cultural lore: America's metropolises do an irreplaceable job. They're engines for assimilating new arrivals.
Everybody acknowledges that the demographics of an inner-city neighborhood change over time. It's almost like a conveyer belt. Norwegians--chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga--German Jews--chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga--Polish, Jews and Catholics--chugga, chugga, chugga--Irish--chugga, chugga, chugga--Chinese--chugga, chugga, chugga--Mexicans and Salvadoreans...The "chugga-chugga-chugga" is the regular mechanical churning, as each wave of new arrivals, in turn, cycles through a given ghetto neighborhood, over the course of generations becoming middle-class, assimilating, and dispersing.
From the perspective of 1961, Jane Jacobs devotes considerable discussion to the breakdown of this conveyer belt. She argues that city neighborhoods with sufficiently dense populations, even given economic disadvantages, can and do become more vibrant--less poor--over time. But permanent "slummification," according to Jacobs, occurs distressingly often, and results chiefly from misguided big-government "civic redevelopment" schemes and corrupt banking practices. Her examples are heartbreaking.
As of the 1940s, Jacobs notes that East Harlem was "written off by lenders," who refused to finance the rehabilitation of aging buildings and infrastructure. Perhaps racial prejudice fueled banking decisions; perhaps it was that slums, as Jacobs notes elsewhere in the book, profited private landlords handsomely. Regardless of banks' rejection of it, however, "One area, near the foot of the Triborough Bridge, continued unslumming and rehabilitating in spite of every obstacle." Jacobs means that successful businesses grew up, on safe, attractive streets. City Hall, naturally, dispatched the New York City Housing Authority to "clean up the blight" of East Harlem, razing its old buildings to make way for costly new housing projects (that inevitably failed). "The Housing Authority's own site managers, when they had to drive people out so that a huge immured slum, Wagner Houses, could be built there instead, were amazed and mystified that improvements so substantial and plentiful should be wiped away."
We hear a lot of babble from politicians and other paid chatterers about the supposedly intractable problems in our cities--the poverty and illiteracy, the addiction, the "stubborn" crime epidemic, the despair. When I was growing up, I regularly sat at a dinner table where the "conveyer belt" of middle-class assimilation was often discussed, with quite a lot of speculation as to why that mechanism seemed to work well for some ethnic groups, while largely failing others. The speculation, unfortunately, turned to the supposed genetic endowments of different races.
Early in life, I took in sensible-seeming observations. But I had no way of evaluating their context.
As Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961, cities "grow the middle class"--unless they're prevented from doing so. A striking article by Leslie Fulbright appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last month. It concerned the history of San Francisco's Western Addition, a one-time thriving African-American neighborhood. The article amplified themes in "Death and Life," illustrating some common, little-discussed ways city neighborhoods have been prevented from "growing the middle class." If you don't want to follow the link, the occasion for the article was the announced dissolution this summer of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. The piece contains the following paragraph:
The redevelopment of the Western Addition...was one of the largest urban renewal efforts in the West. The California Redevelopment Act of 1945 allowed cities and counties to create redevelopment areas to combat urban blight, which was defined by economics, dilapidation of housing and social conditions--including the size of the nonwhite population.
Life-giving, indispensable, but also, for reasons both superstitious and political, somehow "dirty." Cities in America are like sex, aren't they?
In her book, Jane Jacobs writes the about how intelligent minds harbor illogic beliefs:
A friend of mine reached the age of eighteen believing that babies were born through their mothers' navels. She got the idea as a young child, and whatever she heard from then on, she modified into her initial mistake...
It was probably difficult, in the time of which Jacobs writes, to get detailed, unbiased information about human reproduction. For reasons that are both different, and strikingly similar, it's hard to get unbiased information today about cities and their troubles.
The ignorance is destructive. It feeds bias and waste. It subjects us to manipulation by powerful interests that want to remain in power.