back-to-the-city movement

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

by Richard Florida  · 28 Jun 2009  · 325pp  · 73,035 words

are organized around highway interchanges, business parks, and shopping malls.4 But confounding this trend is the worldwide urban shift as well as a significant back-to-the-city movement. A powerful wave of gentrification has swept urban areas, bringing loft housing, condo conversions, historic preservation, new restaurants, retail outlets, and nightlife back to city

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feel as if they have been invaded by an alien culture, even while some of them make a mint from selling their homes. The recent back-to-the-city movement among boomers has already changed the dynamics of entire communities, making it nearly impossible for subsequent generations to buy in, pushing them to fringe districts

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt  · 23 Apr 2012  · 281pp  · 86,657 words

to some form of reemergence of urban choice. But suppose one grants many of the predictions made by those who attempt to debunk any significant back-to-the-city movement among the millennial generation. The generation is simply so large—by one conventional measure, sixty to seventy million people—that even a respectable minority of

The New Class Conflict

by Joel Kotkin  · 31 Aug 2014  · 362pp  · 83,464 words

left. “The new American dream is a condo in the city,” argues Fox News commentator Kate Rogers in a very typical media statement.6 The “back to the city” movement increasingly relies on a new model of urbanism that is less about creating opportunity for the aspirational class and more about offering what former New

Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation

by Tom McGrath  · 3 Jun 2024  · 326pp  · 103,034 words

wanted authenticity. By the late ’70s, the phenomenon of young professionals situating themselves in cities was widespread enough that it had earned a name: the “Back to the City” movement. Reporters started writing occasional pieces about what was happening—perhaps cities weren’t dead, after all?—and curious academics decided the phenomenon, while still nascent

Suburban Nation

by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck  · 14 Sep 2010  · 321pp  · 85,267 words

, and entertainment uses within one mile of the downtown (David Petersen, “Smart Growth for Center Cities,” 51). bv This may not last, as a nascent back-to-the-city movement could soon give Houston a downtown that can compete against its fabled Galleria. Interestingly, unlike in most East Coast cities, in Houston the urban settlers

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

by Tom Standage  · 16 Aug 2021  · 290pp  · 85,847 words

, here increasing lengths of commute, here in pre-car days, here subsidized public transportation for, here, here suburbs American-style, global imitation of, here and “back to the city” movement, here and cars, reliance on, here, here and discriminatory loan practices, here expansion with improved transportation, here high carbon footprint of, here as less prevalent

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification

by Peter Moskowitz  · 7 Mar 2017  · 288pp  · 83,690 words

inner cities have been purposely depressed and therefore are now profitable to reinvest in. That led Smith to conclude that “gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement all right, but a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people.” Most cities in the US experienced slow bleeds of capital thanks to deindustrialization and white flight, which eventually

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/great-depression/wpa-the-works-progress-administration. Between 1977 and 1984, there were 130 such conversions: Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, 29. “gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement”: Smith, New Urban Frontier, 70. “Though the majority of residents may never contemplate”: Quoted in Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America

by Jon C. Teaford  · 1 Jan 2006  · 395pp  · 115,753 words

who chose to avoid the suburban lifestyle and live in the central city were most often those least dependent on central-city government services. The back-to-the-city movement appealed to childless young professionals who did not suffer personally from the poor quality of inner-city public schools. Central cities attracted these young adults

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. By the late 1980s, metropolitan America offered it all. Back to the City Underlying the new optimism about the urban core was a much publicized back-to-the-city movement. After decades of outward migration to suburbia, the white middle class seemed to be headed back to the old neighborhoods, where they were investing in

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rehabilitation schemes. Throughout the half century after World War II, mayors and urban business leaders sought to draw middle-class money to the core. The back-to-the-city movement was just one more stage in that effort. Working-class city dwellers might benefit from the restaurant jobs created in revitalized neighborhoods, but back-to

Vanishing New York

by Jeremiah Moss  · 19 May 2017  · 479pp  · 140,421 words

. A quarterly bulletin by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York titled “Are the Gentry Returning?” found little evidence to support the idea that the back-to-the-city movement had begun in earnest. They concluded, “The overall attractiveness of New York City to the ‘gentry’ . . did not grow between 1970 and 1980.” In fact

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It

by Richard Florida  · 9 May 2016  · 356pp  · 91,157 words

entered into a period of rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation, of which this book is the result. I began to see the back-to-the-city movement as something that conferred a disproportionate share of its benefits on a small group of places and people. I found myself confronting the dark side

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order to restore some sorely needed balance and perspective to the conversation. As we will see, the pace of gentrification has picked up as the back-to-the-city movement has accelerated since the year 2000. But as of yet, it has mainly affected the rather exclusive club of superstar cities and tech hubs. And

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though a large body of research finds that relatively few people are directly displaced by gentrification, the bigger problem lies in the way the back-to-the-city movement has driven up urban housing prices in these cities across the board, with the burden falling most heavily on the poor and disadvantaged. Ultimately, the

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area’s real estate values. Indeed, gentrification has become a much more contentious issue today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, as the back-to-the-city movement has accelerated and real estate prices have skyrocketed in superstar cities. Between 1990 and 2014, more than half of America’s one hundred largest cities

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neighborhoods between 2000 and 2014, according to data put together by real estate economist Jed Kolko, was the richest 10 percent of US households. This back-to-the-city movement of the affluent and advantaged has been most noticeable in New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Boston, DC, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and Denver, but

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people across the nation, even though they accounted for just 5 percent of the population overall. For all this, the biggest demographic force in the back-to-the-city movement is not the Millennials, who were born in the early 1980s through about 2000, but the slightly older Generation Xers, who were born between the

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privileged subset of young people that is headed back to cities.13 If affluent whites have been the driving force behind gentrification and the broader back-to-the-city movement, middle-class blacks have also played a role. A third of the income gains that occurred in more than 15,000 urban neighborhoods between 1990

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cities, including educated and working-class whites. But all of this changed sharply after 2000 as people began flowing back to urban centers. Second, the back-to-the-city movement has been overwhelmingly driven by affluent and highly educated whites. In 1980, only two metros—New York and Santa Barbara—had large shares of affluent

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growing tendency for the affluent to want to locate in closer proximity to work to avoid long commutes. But the most important factor driving the back-to-the-city movement of affluent, educated whites is access to the amenities cities offer—from libraries and museums to restaurants and cafés. By moving back to the urban

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the new patchwork geography and the factors that are reshaping our cities and suburbs today. The first of today’s new patterns arises from the back-to-the-city movement of people in superstar cities and tech hubs. As mentioned above, the cities and metros that exemplify this pattern include the superstars of New York

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metros are more spread out, are more car-dependent, and have much less mass transit than the superstar cities and knowledge hubs discussed above. The back-to-the-city movement has also been more limited in these metros than in the cities previously covered, and they have smaller shares of the creative class as well

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as Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze, with their large, historical houses and tree-lined streets (see Figure 7.13). Pittsburgh has also seen a back-to-the-city movement in its well-preserved downtown core and old warehousing zone, the Strip District, and adjacent neighborhoods. Still, the bulk of the region’s creative class

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-class concentrations that are similar to some of the metros in the first model, but not quite as dense. They have seen more of a back-to-the-city movement than the metros in the second model, but their creative-class contingents tend to be more suburban than in the first model. As their urban

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greater margin on the more accurate value-per-square-foot basis. This trend is considerably more pronounced in superstar cities and knowledge hubs where the back-to-the-city movement has been most prominent. In Greater Boston, urban and suburban homes were valued at around $100 per square foot each in 1997. By 2015, urban

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.) as Patchwork Metropolis, 144–145, 144 (fig.) startups in, 44 (table), 45–46 Australia, 212 Avent, Ryan, 26 average worker, pay of, 14–15, 31 back-to-the-city movement clustering and, 124 gentrification and, 58, 62–64 Patchwork Metropolis and, 124, 129, 137, 143 suburban crisis and, 157 backlash, xvi, xix, 81, 215 Bakersfield

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in Patchwork Metropolis, 12, 122–124 in suburbs, 121–122, 154, 162–163 in superstar cities, 123–124 Clinton, Hillary, xx, 164, 185, 188 clustering back-to-the-city movement and, 124 in capitalism, 33 contradictions of, 8–9, 33 economic growth from, 166, 191 factors in, 123–124 of firms and industries, 21, 33

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., 14 Freeman, Lance, 58, 72 Friedman, Milton, 209 frontier, closing of, 189–190 gated community, 215 Gay and Lesbian index, 222 Generation Xers, 63 gentrification back-to-the-city movement and, 58, 62–64 in Baltimore, 97 challenges of, 56 class divide and, 78 correlations for, 223 (table) creative class and, 60 defined, 59 economic

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, Edgar, 128 housing policy, 199–200 urban workforce, 199 See also affordable housing; homeownership housing costs American Dream and, 190 in Austin, 29, 29 (fig.) back-to-the-city movement increasing, 58 in Boston, 31, 31 (table), 157 creative class and, 37–38, 48, 55 gentrification increasing, 66, 69–74, 71 (table) geography shaping, 28

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gentrification and, 63 neighborhoods, xvii, xix, 7, 12, 98–99, 215 schools and, 66 service jobs and, 11, 202–206 Miliband, Ed, 212 Millennials in back-to-the-city movement, 63 as renters, 200 minimum wage, increase in, 204–205 mixed-use neighborhoods, 28, 66, 137, 166, 193, 199 Moby, 35–36, 52 Moos, Markus

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Ezra, 125–127, 127 (fig.) parks High Line, 37, 66, 194 investment in, 66 Patchwork Metropolis Atlanta, 138, 138 (fig.) Austin, 144–145, 144 (fig.) back-to-the-city movement and, 124, 129, 137, 143 Boston, 134–136, 135 (fig.) Chicago, 131–132, 131 (fig.) class divide in, 12, 122–124 creative class in, 122

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, 44 (table) superstar cities overlapping with, 45 venture capital investment in, 43–45, 44 (table), 49 Stockholm, 16 (table), 17 suburban crisis, 7, 12, 150 back-to-the-city movement and, 157 cheap growth and, 165–166, 190 costs of, 158–161 crime in, 157 job growth and, 160–161 politics influenced by, 163–165

Born in Flames

by Bench Ansfield  · 15 Aug 2025  · 366pp  · 138,787 words