Downtown

Downtown: Its Rise and Fall (1880 - 1950)
© 2001 Robert Fogelson
544 pages

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city!
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
 -- how can you lose? 
The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your care...
("Downtown", Petula Clark)

When Petula Clark sang that she knew a place you can go, she may have well been speaking of downtown, for it used to be the place to go. Downtown chronicles the decline of American city centers, from Gilded Age preeminence to steady 20th century decay.  Though ostensibly concerning the local politics of major cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles especially),  this is in a sense a social history, the complete transformation of how Americans lived, shopped, and traveled told through the decline of city centers.  The author writes without any apparent agenda, something of an accomplishment given the central subject of public policy.  Despite the role played by city, state, and the national government in hastening the disintegration of American cities,  even unintentionally, Fogelson's conclusion is that the state of urban development in the United States has more to do with an instinctual aversion to crowded city centers than public policy.  While that's an unsatisfactory explanation of suburbia, it doesn't diminish Downtown as a gold mine of information about the gradual transformation of transportation, housing, and public policy.

A city is nothing less than an economic engine, a place formed by the coming together of producers and merchants to trade. So it was with American downtowns; commercial enterprises preferred to congregate one another. The reasons were simple: prior to telecommunications and rapid transportation,  business transactions were handled in person, and companies preferred to be close to their supporting services -- to their bankers and insurance agencies, for instance.  What transportation systems existed at the time favored central locations for streamlined delivery and sales.  Given the eagerness of enterprises to acquire land close to the action downtown for commercial purposes,  land values there rose, and residents who could cashed in to settle in the country.  From those elevated land prices grew elevated buildings, when the arrival of industrial steel manufacturing allowed for it:  landowners wanted to maximize the use of the land they were paying so dearly for, and so the towers soared.  Downtown was not  exclusively commercial;  apartment buildings took equal advantage of the Bessemer process to compete with offices in the climb toward the sky.  Though some city-dwellers complained about the towers blocking light, few attempts to limit the height of buildings took; even what scant regulations appeared were quickly riddled through with variances.

The commericial life of the city would involve political meddling, however.   The attempt of an entire a metropolitan area to conduct its shopping, banking, and theater-going in one relatively small area lead to chronic congestion.  This is a congestion beyond levels appreciable by Americans today, even those who sit in LA traffic jams.  Photos show pedestrians shuffling down sidewalks cheek-to-jowl, trolleys crammed like sardines and the streets utterly filled with these as well as horse carriages, rag-wagons, and delivery carts.  That traffic was the economic life of the city, but the thought of competing in such crowds could fill some with despair: was it really worth it?  What it was worth is a question pursued by city governments who attempted to find some better way of transportation in and to the city center,  either elevated or underground train lines. (Trolleys were nice, of course, but the glorious chaos of city streets meant they were frequently slowed and altogether blocked by pedestrians and carts.)   Such prospects were expensive undertakings for private enterprise, and required considerably more politcking -- getting permissions from landowners to dig under them, for instance --  and so city governments themselves often had to take on the burden of attempting them.  The el-lines were not altogether popular, casting a constant gloom over the streets and treating pedestrians to showers of sparks and cinders.   Subways were much more expensive and time-consuming to build, a daunting fact given periodic economic downswings, but little by little the major cities edged into using them.

Change was in the air, however. Frustrated with the chronic congestion of the city center, made worse now by construction in the rights-of-way,  some urbanites  began shopping closer to home when they could.  Soaring land values also tempted start-up businesses into offering their goods outside the city center, as well; other residential areas might not deliver as much traffic, but concentrated near the trolley lines as they were,  a go could still be made.  Soon downtown apartment stores were joining them, sending out colonies -- branches -- to do business to residents who didn't want to come to them.  Technology was allowing for more distance between residents and businesses, too;  a man could now telephone his accountant, or extend his traveling range in a relatively cheap automobile.  The arrival of automobiles into the downtown core only worsened congestion, however, consuming much more space than pedestrian traffic, especially when parked. They arrived at the worst possible time, too, when the economic life of American cities was threatened by the worse economic disaster in its history. The Great Depression, which would break the back of American urbanism, arrived in 1929.

The calamitous effects of the Depression were not limited to the economic havoc itself. Land values fell, and under unrelenting property taxes --  constituting the bulk of municipal budgets --   more than a few landowners torn down their towers to build parking lots instead.  Requiring zero labor and taking in fees from automobiles, such holes in the urban fabric were known as 'taxpayers'.   As people continued to shop on the outskirts instead of the center, downtown merchants decided their problems were two-fold. First, there was there was the problem of accessibility; no one wanted to come downtown because it was too crowded, as Yogi Berra might have put it. Elevated lines were too unpopular, trolleys increasingly in dire straits because of overzealous expansion and a public that didn't want to pay for the privilege of traveling like a mobile sardine, and subways too expensive.  Secondly,  as the upper and middle classes drifted out of the city into the rail suburbs, they left a vacuum filled with the kind of  riff-raff that scared off good customers.   Who would come downtown when they had to pass through tenement blocks filled with gangs of working men, immigrants, and mobs of un-supervised youngsters?    Several factors conspired against these tenements:   Reform movements, which saw the tenements as unfit for human life; the downtown businessmen, who wanted to distance the rabble from their shoppers, and the government, which needed to create jobs. Together a plan was born:  seize the land,  tear down the tenements, and build things like freeways and 'modern'  housing projects.  Government involvement was now quite beyond municipalities: the Federal government itself was active in urban areas, deciding what buildings should go and what kind should remain.  FDR's new government programs effectively encouraged urban decentralization by subsidizing developing outside the city, and impeding  private development within it by refusing such largesse, especially when minorities were involved.  The damage done by this kind of improvement -- the erection of wall-like freeways gutting the city and directing activity into the suburbs --  continued to sap the strength of the once dominant city center. It had already fallen from THE place to do business to merely the main place for business; now it lost even that  as the future of America became written in interstates, parking lots, and  strip malls.


Downtown is a a wealth of information, and remarkably varied -- covering in different chapters the politics of subway construction or housing policy.  It is a dispassionate obituary, even if it misdiagnoses the  cause of death.



Related:

• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America, Kenneth Jackson
• Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton
• Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the 20th Century, Stephen Goddard
• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay

Crabgrass Frontier

Crabgrass Frontier:  The Suburbanization of the United States
© 1985 Kenneth Jackson
432 pages

For thousands of years, people lived in either the country or the city, but with the coming of the industrial revolution that changed, and especially in America.   Seemingly as soon as they were able, the wealthy and later the middle class abandoned the cities in favor of neighborhoods set in the country, first commuting into the city and then commuting to other areas outside it once jobs followed the wealth out of town. Why was the traditional urban form abandoned for the suburbs to the degree that it was in the United States, and not in Europe? In Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson chronicles urban flight and the making of the 'burbs,  establishing that Americans have an historic cultural distaste for cities,  inherited through England,  and have been trying to have the best of both worlds, city and country, at least since the end of the 18th century.  Wealth and technology first allowed a prosperous minority to establish separate country residences, and later government policy made ex-urban living the easiest choice to make, resulting in it becoming the cultural norm. Jackon begins detached and eventually waxes passionate as the suburbs' success prove to be at the expense of the cities, but he's never caustic.

The Revolutionary War was scarcely over before suburbs appeared on the American scene; even before horsecars, trolley lines, and the automobile, wealthy citizens of New York established their residences on the Brooklyn Heights nearby, and commuted by ferry.  While the borders of cities have historically been slums, home to necessary but despised industries like leather tanneries, in the United States cities came to be ringed by affluence.  Reasons for the wealthy leaving were varied, but a desire to get away from the city's "problems" -- the noise of industry and the presence of common working folk -- ranked high. The simplest explanation, however, is that they could. The United States had more land than it knew what to do with. At first, living outside the city and commuting to it to work was the domain of the very wealthy, but the arrival of railroads allowed moderately wealthy persons to join in.  The trolley and the introduction of balloon-frame homebuilding made suburban living affordable for more people, and saw a manifold increase in the number of these communities. This was not the beginning of sprawl, however: even as they multiplied,  suburban communities remained distinct, walkable places.

It was the automobile which allowed suburbia to truly transform the urban landscape, extending the ease of complete mobility to the entire middle class. At the same time, government policies promoted suburban expansion, directly and indirectly, by promoting home ownership through subsidized loans and highways. Having lost the wealthy and middle classes, their tax base, cities deteriorated further, prompting even more flight. At the same time, home loan and insurance policies favored the suburbs heavily, stifling attempts by those in the city to improve or protect their buildings. These policies were at times openly racist, denying coverage or loans to whole blocks if a Jewish or black family were to move in.

Motivated by a cultural preference for country homes over city living, enabled by the widespread availability of open land --and technological innovations like the rail line and automobile which used that land as a broad canvas to draw an entirely new kind of urban landscape - and further encouraged by government support, the Americans thus became suburbanized.  The work, which Jackson introduces as an extended essay, ends with a reflection on where the suburbs are taking the American people. Built on cheap land, connected by cheap transport, and occupied by cheap buildings,  Jackson believes contemporary sprawl to be not worth much in comparison to the city, and points to trends in the 1980s which might signal a turning point.

Thirty years after the fact, we know that sprawl recovered from those hiccoughs, only for its tide to slow and reverse in the later years of the 21st century's opening decade,  influenced by the financial crisis and the new normal of  high gasoline prices.  The Millennial generation has displayed a sharp preference for city living over the burbs, and car ownership is on the decline. As Americans begin to rebuild their cities and the civilization which they foster, this look back at what caused their disintegration will prove most helpful. This comprehensive history of suburbia not only establishes why American suburbs are so different from those from across the world, but delves into the full range of factors that led to their creation: cultural, technological, economic, and political.  Those wanting to understand the development of suburbia will find it a worthy guide,  especially for its less strident tone as compared to an author like Jim Kunstler.

Related:
The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
Suburban Nation, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck
Asphalt Nation,  Jane Holtz Keay

The Working Poor

The Working Poor: Invisible in America
© 2004 David Shipler
352 pages

"Like my daddy used to say -- 'Son, life's hell to pay for when you're poor -- cause  always just outside the door's another Hard Time.'"    (Jerry Reed)

The United States is simultaneously one of the richest and poorest countries in the world, a land marked by both obscene waste and desperate poverty. Explanations vary as to the cause of the widening income gap; some blame a deteriorating culture, others globalized free trade, and still others maintain it's a classic case of exploitation.  Poverty may be endemic to economics, but the great tragedy is tragedy's juxtaposition with the American dream of success: work hard and you will prosper. Reality is more complicated than that. In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David Shipler shares the lives of people who, despite long shifts, can't get ahead.  They are black, white, Hispanic and Asian; some have lived here for generations, others are newly arrived immigrants. The reasons for their quicksand desperation are complex and varied: although many mire themselves in self-destructive cycles of behaviors, others are truly and continually ensnared by cycles of poverty -- poor housing that leads to bad health that leads to spotty employment and debt that lead to poor housing.  It's not as if they don't try, but the odds are against them: even a small hiccup, an unexpected dilemma, can completely derail hopes of progress.

  Shipler's work doesn't propose any grand national agenda like the War on Poverty, and his account demonstrates how problematic proposed solutions have been so far.  Welfare offers intrusive, obtrusive bureaucracy and distorted incentives;  public education for impoverished areas is largely a failure, and while there are a great many incompetent teachers, whose talent is less about communicating with children and more memorizing what Has to be Taught,  the reality of poverty is that it isn't just material. There's a greater cultural poverty present that Shipler details as well: a loss of hope, of ambition. Some of the stories here are outright depressing in demonstrating how failure can run in a family, with unparented children growing up to have babies who grow up likewise unparented. They lack not just the data accumulated in twelve years of schooling, but ordinary life skills.  There are also hopeful stories, like the single parent who embraced poverty of the material kind by refusing to work two jobs, deciding that devoting time to her children, giving them the attention and instruction they need, was more important than a financial cushion.  Though raising two children on a single  wage was hard, her children were success stories who later escaped poverty.

The Working Poor is a valuable book, demonstrating that there is more to financial security than simply working hard -- and more to insecurity than bad personal choices. Although Shipler is probably more sympathetic to the progressive, he's by no means convinced that government can be a decisive solution here. His work illustrates how complex the problem of poverty is, communicating to the reader that it would take more than a money dump in one program or another. The problems of poverty -- dismal education,  the costs of healthcare and housing, access to transportation, availability of jobs, the shattered status of a family life -- are all connected, and there is no Gordian solution.  As grim as it can be, the book is girded with hopeful stories of struggle and resilience. Based on extensive interviews and Shipler's own research (including  time spent observing schoolrooms), it's as close to a comprehensive understanding of working class poverty as one will find without living it.

Related:

• Nickle and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenrich. This is the author's account of attempting to live on minimum wage in three different states, with little success. Her experience demonstrated many of the problems here (the costs of housing and expense of transportation, especially)  though family life was not an issue and she never had to deal with state welfare offices. 
• Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser, which also shone a light into the dirty business of migrant agricultural labor.