Cities And Distress: In Plain View, Or Hidden?

How cities shield (or don't shield) their distressed communities from view can alter perceptions of their economic progress.

Within view of Detroit’s Renaissance Center, Ford Field and Comerica Park sits vacant land. Source: gettyimages.com

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Some cities are better at hiding their distressed neighborhoods from general view than others. What’s more, historical development and demographic patterns play a role in a city’s ability to hide distressed neighborhoods and can either hinder or advance a city’s future revitalization prospects.

Those are the key messages I got from Bill Fulton, publisher of the Future of Where Substack newsletter. A couple of days ago he wrote a pretty good article called "garlic knot" cities: cities with downtown cores that are becoming walkable, high-amenity assets, as well as suburbs that continue to grow, but have older city neighborhoods in between that still suffer from extreme poverty.

Here's an extended quote from his article that explains how this came to him:

I spent part of last week in Baltimore – the part that everybody likes to go to. I visited the Baltimore Banner, located in a renovated warehouse in the Inner Harbor, stayed at a hotel across the street from Camden Yards, and had a family lunch celebration (my niece graduated from high school) at a fancy steakhouse back in the Inner Harbor.

Not all of Baltimore, of course, is like this. Like many older rust belt cities that have lost population – Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland – the suburbs are still growing and the center is getting very strong, but the old city neighborhoods are in rough shape. A mile away from where was enjoying a high-amenity experience, people are trapped in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.

We used to call places like Baltimore and Detroit “donut cities,’ because there was nothing left in the center. But after decades of both public and private revitalization efforts, they’re not really donuts anymore. Some time ago, the Christian urbanist (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Aaron Renn called them “The New Donut,” but that term doesn’t quite fit either.

Instead, I’d call them Garlic Knot Cities – very dense and satisfying in the center, but the center is small and doesn’t have much of substance surrounding it.

Baltimore is what Detroit’s becoming

It’s no coincidence that Fulton brought up Detroit when discussing Baltimore, a city that’s gotten a lot of good press recently for its downtown revitalization. Fulton notes that Detroit’s downtown growth has been spearheaded by motivated private actors like Dan Gilbert, a Detroit native and billionaire founder of Rocket Mortgage. Gilbert’s Bedrock real estate development company has done numerous projects in downtown Detroit. The recently completed Book Tower renovation and the soon-to-open Hudson's Detroit mixed-use development are two of Gilbert’s largest projects in the city.

Detroit’s rebirth mirrors what happened in Baltimore starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the opening of the Maryland Science Center, Harborplace, the National Aquarium and the Baltimore Museum of Industry. That activity culminated in 1992 when the Baltimore Orioles opened Oriole Park at Camden Yards in downtown Baltimore. Since then, Baltimore has continued to see growth in its downtown and in its suburbs, but city neighborhoods still struggle.

This isn’t just a Rust Belt city phenomenon

Fulton makes the claim in his piece that his “garlic knot” cities are principally a Rust Belt or legacy city phenomenon. I, however, would beg to differ. I view it as a phenomenon that’s most prominent and visible in these cities, but not at all exclusive to them.

Eleven years ago, I wrote a couple of pieces about gentrification types in different cities. I had a theory at the time that gentrification occurs in certain places in cities in large part due to two factors: 1) the inventory of pre-WWII urban neighborhoods within cities, and 2) the racial and ethnic demographic makeup of pre-WWII neighborhoods. My hypothesis back in 2014 was that the catalyst for 2000s-2010s gentrification was young people seeking to venture out into dense, walkable and high-amenity neighborhoods in cities. One unspoken corollary to that hypothesis was that the younger, mostly suburban types who led this movement were attracted to the neighborhoods like this that were largely inhabited by working-class white residents first. They would move into other neighborhoods inhabited by people of color, particularly Blacks, only when the inventory of white, pre-WWII neighborhoods was exhausted. Why? Probably because of a lack of familiarity with Black and brown neighborhoods, and a desire to stay away from any “GENTRIFIER!!” stigma.

Anyway, I looked at the 64 largest cities in 2010 (those with more than 250,000 people) and sought out two data points for evaluating them. See this quote from the article:

I wanted to categorize cities by old and new development forms, and low and high historic levels of black population. To do that I came up with an arbitrary proxy for the age of development form. Using decennial Census data, if a city reached 50 percent of its peak population by 1940, it was deemed to have an old development form; if a city reached 50 percent of its peak population in 1950 or later, it was deemed to have a new development form. Here's a quick example of how this works. Baltimore, currently with a population of a little over 600,000, reached its peak of 949,000 in 1950. Baltimore reached half its peak, or about 475,000, by 1890, a time at which it could be said that Baltimore's form as a city had been firmly established. Similarly, Austin reached its peak of 790,000 in 2010. The fast-growing Texas city was half that size in only 1990, a year in which it could be said that its development form was established and the city began to see itself as a major city. Imprecise, yes, but a decent proxy for examining old and new city development forms.

The second piece of analysis was gathering Census data on central city black populations in 1970. This decade was chosen largely because it represents the end of the Great Migration, when millions of African-Americans left the rural South for cities across the nation. By that time the cities which are generally recognized as having large black populations had already been identified, and it's possible to explore the impact of the migration on them. I arbitrarily said cities with black populations lower than 25 percent of the total in 1970 had a low black population, and those above 25 percent had a high black population.

I found an interesting broad pattern. Older cities with relatively low Black populations like New York, San Francisco and Boston had experienced lots of gentrification within their city limits (note: NYC’s Black population was below the 25 percent threshold, but not low in an absolute sense). Older cities with higher Black populations had more concentrated gentrification. Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Cleveland, Oakland and St. Louis were among the cities on that list. Younger cities with low Black populations I found to have limited gentrification. Cities here included Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Raleigh (one caveat is that young cities stay young and grow younger by annexing undeveloped land within their boundaries, skewing the data). Lastly, I said that newer cities with high Black populations had very little gentrification. This was the smallest group; only Houston, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Memphis, Tampa and Greensboro, NC made that list.

With 2014 being 2014, framing the types in terms of gentrification was an easy way to get lots of traffic on this idea (note: it worked). But framing it in terms of how poverty is concentrated in metro areas works just as well. Gentrification (or redevelopment or revitalization, whatever you want to call it) is organized in different ways in different metro areas. However, it’s rather loosely organized. Low-income or working-class areas tend to be organized in a more orderly fashion, even if informal. Depending on how low-income and working-class areas are situated in a metro area, neighborhood distress is there for all to see, or hidden from view. And that greatly impacts the perceptions people have of a city and metro area.

Here’s what I mean. In my experience, cities and metro areas tend to organize low-income and working-class neighborhoods within them in one of three ways. They are:

Scattered Distress – Distressed neighborhoods can be found throughout many parts of a metro area, both within and outside of a city. It’s often never too far from more affluent areas, but usually not in concentrations so large that one gets an impression that an entire city or metro area is in distress. The New York and Los Angeles metro areas might be good examples of scattered distress.

Wedged Distress – Distressed neighborhoods are “wedged” into specific areas of cities and metros, usually stretching beyond core city boundaries. The wedged area becomes that way because it was deemed less desirable by a metro’s more affluent residents. Areas near industrial development, rail lines, and low-lying floodplains often become wedged regions. In metros with a wedged development pattern, one can visit an affluent part of the city or metro, and never experience the distressed areas. Conversely, you could visit the low-income and working-class portions of the same metro and leave thinking an entire metro area is under distress. Chicago might be the nation’s clearest example of this, but this is evident in metro areas like Philadelphia, Dallas and New Orleans as well.

Contained Distress – There are a handful of metros where low-income and working-class neighborhoods have almost been completely contained within core city limits. Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, Memphis and Milwaukee stand out as cities that hold virtually all of the low-income/working-class inventory of their respective metro areas.

I’ll follow up with more on this in the next few days.