The City Renewed

The process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominantly low-income, renter-occupied area to a predominantly middle-class, owner-occupied area is called gentrification. Most cities have at least one substantially renovated inner-city neighborhood that has attracted higher-income residents, especially single people and couples without children who are not concerned with the quality of inner-city schools.

Gentrification in Cincinnati

(a) Into the twenty-first century, the inner-city neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine had many abandoned residences and shops. (b) Many of these buildings have been renovated with attractive shops and higher-cost housing.

A deteriorated inner-city neighborhood is attractive for several reasons:

• Inner-city houses may be larger and more substantially constructed yet less expensive than houses in the suburbs.

• Inner-city houses may possess attractive architectural details, such as ornate fireplaces, cornices, high ceilings, and wood trim.

• Inner-city living eliminates the strain of commuting on crowded freeways or public transport for people who work downtown.

• Inner-city neighborhoods are near theaters, bars, restaurants, stadiums, and other cultural and recreational facilities.

Because renovating an old inner-city house can be even more expensive than buying a new one in the suburbs, cities encourage the process by providing low-cost loans and tax breaks. Public expenditures for renovation have been criticized as subsidies for the middle class at the expense of people with lower incomes, who are sometimes forced to move out of the gentrified neighborhoods because the rents in the area suddenly become too high for them.

Reviving Consumer Services

Most consumer services have located in suburbs to be near suburban residents. However, some consumer services are returning to the inner city, in part to meet day-to-day needs of residents of gentrified neighborhoods. Inner-city consumer services are also attracting people looking for leisure activities, such as unusual shops in a dramatic downtown setting or view of a harbor. Several North American CBDs have combined new retail services with leisure services. For example:

• Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace is located in renovated eighteenth-century buildings.

• Baltimore’s Harbor Place is built in the Inner Harbor, adjacent to waterfront museums, tourist attractions, hotels, and cultural facilities.

• Chicago’s Navy Pier, a former cargo dock, has been converted to shops and attractions.

• New York’s South Street Seaport integrates the old fish market with retailing and recreational activities.

• Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century Reading Terminal Market, which barely survived during the twentieth-century suburbanization movement, has been renovated into a thriving marketplace with individual stalls operated by different merchants (Figure 13-72).

• San Francisco’s Ferry Building, where San Francisco Bay ferries dock, is a gourmet food center.

Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia

The market was established in 1893 in a railroad station. The market declined with the rise of suburbs in mid-twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the market has been revitalized to attract office workers and tourists as well as higher-income people living in nearby gentrified neighborhoods.

Pause & Reflect 13.4.2

What might be the attractions and the challenges of buying groceries in places like the Reading Terminal or Ferry Building?

Removing Public Housing

Given the high cost of housing in cities, governments sometimes step in to actually own or support the management of housing for low-income households. In the United States, public housing is government-owned housing rented to low-income people, with rents set at 30 percent of the tenant’s income. In other countries, local governments or nonprofit organizations such as charitable groups build and own much of the housing, aided by subsidies from the national government.

During the mid-twentieth century, many substandard inner-city houses were demolished and replaced with public housing. Several decades later, many of these public housing projects were themselves considered unsatisfactory living environments and in turn have also been demolished. Especially unsatisfactory were high-rise public housing projects. The elevators were frequently broken, and drug use and crime rates were high. Some observers claimed that the high-rise buildings themselves were partly responsible for the problem because too many low-income families were concentrated into a high-density environment.

Demolished Public Housing

One of the most notorious high-rise public housing projects, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, was constructed during the 1950s and demolished during the 1970s.

With the overall level of funding much lower, the supply of public housing and other government-subsidized housing in the United States diminished by approximately 1 million units between 1980 and 2010. But during the same period, the number of households that needed low-rent dwellings increased by more than 2 million. In Britain, the supply of public housing, known as social housing (formerly council estates), also declined because the government forced local authorities to sell some of the dwellings to the residents. The British also expanded subsidies to nonprofit housing associations that build housing for groups with special needs, including single mothers, immigrants, people with disabilities, and elderly people as well as the poor.

Cities try to reduce the hardship on poor families forced to move because their public housing was demolished. U.S. law requires that they be reimbursed both for moving expenses and for rent increases over a four-year period. Western European countries have similar laws. Cities are also renovating old houses specifically for lower-income families through public housing or other programs. By renting renovated houses, a city also helps to disperse low-income families throughout the city instead of concentrating them in large inner-city public housing projects. However, some public housing projects were located in neighborhoods that are now gentrifying, so the new housing that is replacing the demolished high rises may be too expensive for the former public housing residents.

Public Housing and Gentrification

A notorious high-rise public housing project in Chicago called Cabrini Green was located in a gentrifying neighborhood. The project has been demolished and replaced with new housing for middle-class families. This image from 2003 shows two Cabrini Green towers awaiting demolition next to new housing.