One of the best planning articles I've read in a while. I know it's a wall of text, but it really is worth reading.

 

Trading Places

 

By ALAN EHRENHALT

 

Thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a snowstorm. A blizzard in January of 1979 dumped some 20 inches on the ground, causing, among other problems, a curtailment of transit service. The few available trains coming downtown from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms. African Americans and Hispanics blamed this on Mayor Michael Bilandic, and he lost the Democratic primary to Jane Byrne a few weeks later.

 

Today, this could never happen. Not because of climate change, or because the Chicago Transit Authority now runs flawlessly. It couldn't happen because the trains would fill up with minorities and immigrants on the outskirts of the city, and the passengers left stranded at the inner-city stations would be members of the affluent professional class.

 

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Why are all the great reads so poorly formatted? :?

Does that help?

Very much so! :clap:

Bahhh formatting!

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.

 

Won't the service jobs follow the people with money back to the central city?

This is very thoughtful and interesting. Of course, there are flaws:

 

"Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century."

 

I'm not so sure. Sam Walton's WWII experience was as a logistics officer. The explosion of Wal-Mart-style retailing is a story of logistics: Getting cheap goods from many places to all the stores in the chain, yes, but also transferring all the final distribution costs to the customer, who must buy a second car and buy fuel to drive it long distances to buy cheap underwear. This was a brilliant model for retailers in an era of "cheap" (read: subsidized) gas. But it is ultimately unsustainable. Mom-and-pop-type stores will come back in some fashion.

Very good article. Do you have a full citation?

 

A couple things to add on that go along with where the author is at toward the end. We aren't going back to the way it used to be. For a lot of reasons, the traditional hub-spoke city with a single center for commerce and industry with surrounding residential is dead, over, done with.

What we will see is the maturation of the multi-nodal region. The nodes that urbanize and invest in transit that connects it easily with other significant nodes will win and the ones that either don't (addicted to the car) or can't (geography, already declining, what have you) will slide into being slums or at least not successful places. The ego-boosting city sizes of yesteryear just aren't coming back - I'm speaking here of the midwest and northeast. Instead you'll have a series of key nodes. The successful cities will have them in abundance, the unsuccessful ones won't.