7 NEIGHBORHOODS IN AN ERA OF DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING

The Rise of the Millennials and the Decline of the Traditional Family

The United States of the 1960s was a nation of families and above all married couples. As table 7.1 shows, in 1968 nearly three-quarters of American households were married couples. Most were raising children, and of those who were not, most would be raising children in the future or had finally seen their youngest child leave the home. Men and women married far younger and had shorter life expectancies than today. In 1956 the median age for first marriage in the United States was 22.5 for men and 20.1 for women, while life expectancy was 67 years for men and 73 years for women. For most Americans, life included only brief passages through two phases that people today see as extended stages of adult life: independent adult life before marriage and life as active empty nesters before transitioning into old age. Both phases have become important drivers of neighborhood change.

The Disappearing Traditional Nuclear Family

Urban and suburban neighborhoods from the late nineteenth century until well past the mid-twentieth century, as we describe further in chapter 12, were designed for a world of couples raising children. Among those couples, stay-at-home mothers were the norm. In 1950, only 12 percent of mothers with preschool children were part of the labor force. Much of the energy of those young mothers of the 1950s went into sustaining neighborhood life. As Ehrenhalt writes, “the feelings of safety and familiarity that existed for those growing up … were in part created by mothers who stayed home and knew more about what teenagers were up to than the teenagers wanted them to know.”¹

Those days are long gone. Less than half of American households today are married couples, and fewer than half of them are raising children; fewer than one in five households are married couples with children under age eighteen in the home. By 1985, over one-third of mothers in married couples with preschool children were in the labor force; today, nearly two-thirds are. In most child-rearing couples today both husband and wife work, but barely one-quarter of American households of any type are raising children. From being the dominant household type, married couple families have become simply one of many different forms of household, none of them dominant in the sense that any one defines the social framework for American neighborhoods. For many of the growing number of other households, the traditional single-family neighborhood today is a poor fit for their needs, their capabilities, or their aspirations.

These shifts have been most pronounced in the nation’s central cities (table 7.2). More families have left, and more single people have moved into cities compared to less urban places. Nearly half of all the households in Washington, D.C., are single individuals. Only one out of four are married couple households, and fewer than one in ten are married couples raising children. Both Washington and Pittsburgh have far more nonfamily households, including unmarried couples living together and people in a variety of informal sharing arrangements. This may not quite be the “childless city” bemoaned by some commentators, but their characterization is not too far from the mark.²

The flow of urban families with children to the suburbs in search of a better life is well known, from the first waves of suburbanization even before World War II, the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s, and today’s Black flight as thousands of middle-income African American families follow in their white counterparts’ footsteps.³ The second trend, while widely publicized, is often poorly understood: namely, the influx of young people, often categorized as the millennial generation, into central cities. Since the significance of this influx for the future of cities and their neighborhoods is arguably even greater than that of the shift in household types, we will explore it and chart its parameters in some detail.

The March of the Millennials

Although to refer to all young people moving into cities as the millennial generation is imprecise, it is not an inappropriate shorthand.⁴ The pace of in-migration picked up notably as that generation, born between 1981 and 1996, began to come of age after 2000, especially since 2010. While some writers have argued that the migration is overstated, they fail to recognize that it is not all millennials who are disproportionately moving to central cities but specifically those millennials who have at least a four-year college degree and not to all cities in equal numbers. One of the authors has previously called this group the “young grads.”

Table 7.3 shows the change from 2000 to 2018 in the number of young people aged twenty-five to thirty-four by education level for eight American cities: three magnet cities, three reviving midwestern cities, and two Sunbelt cities. In looking at table 7.3, one should bear in mind that in 2018, 36 percent, or slightly more than one-third of people aged twenty-five to thirty-four overall in the United States, had a BA or higher degree and made up only 5 percent of the population of the United States as a whole. From 2000 to 2018, the number of young people with a BA+ degree grew by 416,000 in these eight cities, accounting for almost half of their total growth; in Boston and Washington, D.C., they were over 60 percent of all growth, while in Chicago their number grew by over 100,000 while the city lost 177,000 people overall. In every city, the increase in young grads was greater from 2010 to 2018 than during the previous decade.

Meanwhile, the number of young people without BA degrees in these cities was dropping; indeed, if one leaves out San Antonio and Phoenix, the decline was well over 100,000. Those two cities show quite a different picture from the magnet and midwestern cities. In the latter, growth in young grads is their principal source of population growth, and they are becoming a disproportionately large share of the population. In the Sunbelt cities, their numbers are growing, but slowly; they make up only a small share of total population growth, and their share of the population is below the national average.

The growth of young grads in cities such as Washington and Seattle, where they now make up nearly one out of every four adult residents, has powerful implications for these cities’ neighborhoods. They are largely single or if not are in informal relationships. In Washington, D.C., only 7 percent of people ages twenty-five to twenty-nine were currently married in 2018. While they may at some point marry, raise children, and start looking for a single-family house, that day may be years off. In the meantime, they are much more likely to seek out neighborhoods that offer what sociologist Terry Nichols Clarke calls a “scene,” centers of “entertainment, consumption and amenities.”⁵

The in-migration of young grads is the strongest factor driving the conversion of historically nonresidential downtown areas such as Washington Avenue in St. Louis and Old City Philadelphia into residential neighborhoods and the gentrification of residential areas close to downtown or to major employers, anchor institutions, and amenities. Figures 7.1 and 7.2 show areas with concentrations of young grads in Baltimore in 2000 and 2018 (areas where 20 percent or more of the population is twenty-five to thirty-four years of age and 50 percent or more of the population have BA or higher degrees). From a few small pockets around the Inner Harbor and a small area three miles to the north adjacent to Johns Hopkins University, young grads have spread to occupy much of central and northern Baltimore, around the harbor, and throughout downtown, where thousands of residential units have been created from old office buildings, as well as north and west of the Johns Hopkins University campus. The spread of young grads matches almost precisely the locus of gentrification in Baltimore.

Aging and the Empty Nest

The US population is aging, albeit less rapidly than in countries such as Japan and Italy, driven by declining birth rates and increasing life expectancy and only partly offset by immigration. While increases in life expectancy have stalled in recent years, birth rates have continued to decline. Meanwhile, the size of the baby boom generation, roughly half of whom were over age sixty-five in 2020, will continue to fuel an increase in the elderly population for the next decade. At least partly for that reason, the rate of increase in the elderly population has accelerated since around 2000. While from 1960 to 2000 the number of people over age sixty-five in the United States grew by an average of 450,000 to 500,000 per year, since 2000 it has been growing by 800,000 per year.

In contrast to the decline in child-rearing families and the rise in college-educated young people, both of which disproportionately affect central cities, the aging of America has a different spatial impact. While some individual urban neighborhoods are seeing growing elderly populations, the greatest impact of the aging trend is visible in rural and small-town America and within metropolitan areas in what can be called an “aging zone,” concentrated in the inner-suburban ring around central cities largely corresponding to the first generation of post–World War II suburbs. That ring is clearly visible in the Philadelphia area in figure 7.3, along with the area inside the city known as the Far Northeast, the last part of the city to be developed during the late 1940s and 1950s and demographically similar to the inner-ring suburbs outside the city’s borders. The darkest shading shows census tracts where 25 percent or more of the population is over age sixty-five, an elderly population share close to that of Japan, where the current figure is 28 percent. Similar aging clusters exist in most older American metropolitan areas.

The aging of the American population is likely to have unpredictable effects on the neighborhoods where older adults live or to which they may move. While some older people do indeed migrate to the Sunbelt, that is far from a universal tendency as a 2011 report summed it up. “Although the myth persists that older adults move en masse to the Sunbelt states once they retire, the overwhelming evidence is that older adults prefer to ‘age in place’ in their existing homes and communities.”⁶ Most elderly people do not move, while many who do move will remain in the same community or region. As a result, many towns and neighborhoods, such as those in figure 7.3, are coming to be referred to as Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities or NORCs. The concentration of older people in these areas is changing not only the demand for public facilities and social services, prompting many creative innovations around the country, but also the social dynamics of these neighborhoods.

The empty nester phenomenon is somewhat different. As baby boomers’ children have grown up and the boomers have reached their fifties and sixties largely active and healthy, their choices have become a major concern of pundits, demographers, and developers. Dozens of reports and blog posts have appeared on the effects of this generational downsizing and on empty nesters’ purported return to the cities. In all of this it is difficult to separate, in Nate Silver’s phrase, “the signal from the noise.”⁷ The much-heralded return of empty nesters to the cities appears largely anecdotal or promotional, supported by little quantifiable evidence. That is not to say that it is not taking place at all; the anecdotes are likely to signify something. While there is undoubtedly some movement of empty nesters into central cities, as a factor in urban neighborhood change its effects are modest compared to those of the Young Grads.

That may change. The sheer number of baby boomers makes them a significant wild card in terms of their influence on future neighborhood trends in both urban and suburban America. At the same time, one should not assume that all or even most of the members of that generation are the affluent, well-educated, and worldly couples portrayed in the media. Most are not college graduates and lack either the means or the inclination to move into a condo in Philadelphia’s Center City or a row house near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Race, Ethnicity and Immigration

As we discussed in chapter 3, urban neighborhoods in the early twentieth century were largely defined by ethnic and racial identities. Most were dominated by a single white ethnic community, while after the end of World War I almost every city saw a distinct African American ghetto emerge, defined by legal restrictions and social constraints. The great majority of white ethnic neighborhoods gradually disappeared in the years after World War II. While the assimilation of the native-born children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation drove much of their demise, it was hastened by the end of mass immigration. The number of immigrant arrivals in the United States dropped from over eight million in the first decade of the twentieth century to fewer than seven hundred thousand in the 1930s, while from 1930 to 1970 the number of foreign-born residents in the United States dropped by nearly one-third, from fourteen million to under ten million, and their share of the population dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent.⁸

This was the product of the 1924 Immigration Act, which had established draconian immigration quotas based on the national origins of the historic population of the United States. Under that law, for example, between 1946 and 1950 only slightly more than 1,000 people were admitted each year from the entire Asian continent.⁹ In 1960, 89 percent of the population was classified as “white” and almost all the remaining 11 percent was classified as “Negro,” in the terminology of the time. Only 0.5 percent of the population fit into neither category, while there were so few Latinx immigrants from countries other than Mexico that the US Census Bureau did not even bother to classify them by country of origin, putting them all into a single “other Americas” category.

In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolishing national quotas. Although proponents played down the possibility that the bill would have a significant impact on immigration flows or the demographic makeup of the country, few bills before or since have had such a fundamentally transformative effect on American society. The Hart-Celler Act turned the United States into a multinational, multiethnic nation.

Table 7.4 compares the racial and ethnic composition of the United States today to that of 1960 but that table barely begins to hint at the diversity of the American population. Roughly 10 percent of American Black people are African and Caribbean immigrants, while the Asian umbrella includes not only large numbers of people from China, Korea, India, and the Philippines but also some from virtually every Asian nation. The Census Bureau breaks down America’s fifty-six million Latinx residents into twenty-four separate subcategories and even then finds that over one million fail to fit into any category. Nearly 14 percent of the nation’s population are foreign-born, only slightly fewer than at the historic peak nearly a hundred years ago.

The Black population in the United States is more spatially dispersed than in the 1950s. In contrast to that era, however, when Black ghettos housed an economically diverse population with rich, middle-class, and poor rubbing elbows, today’s Black population lives in far more economically homogenous although still often racially distinct clusters.¹⁰ The vibrancy of neighborhoods such as Bronzeville and Black Bottom is a thing of the past. While many of those neighborhoods were destroyed by urban renewal or highway construction, as happened to Black Bottom in Detroit, it is unlikely that they would have survived the social and economic changes of the last sixty years intact.

The increase in immigration has led to a resurgence of ethnic neighborhoods. While the greatest change has been in the growth of Latinx communities, urban and suburban areas have both seen a proliferation of immigrant ethnic neighborhoods of every description. Since immigrants to the United States are highly diverse economically as well as racially and ethnically, their neighborhoods vary widely economically, with some immigrant communities being affluent, some poor, and some containing a mix of people of different economic levels.

Three large contiguous suburban townships in central New Jersey with a combined population of roughly 260,000 are now nearly 40 percent Asian or of Asian descent, with three-quarters of those from India (figure 7.4). As one writer describes Edison Township, “From indoor cricket to a Hindu temple, paan shops, dosa and biryani stalls, and saris in the store windows, this eastern U.S. suburban area could be an Indian municipality.”¹¹ Oak Tree Road, known as “Little India,” is a shopping district one and a half mile long that “attracts South Asian customers from Maine to Maryland.”¹² The area is an affluent one; in 2017, the median income of Asian households in Edison was nearly $120,000.

Suburban enclaves as affluent as Edison tend to be the exceptions among immigrant neighborhoods, but an immense variety of neighborhood configurations have come into being. While immigration magnets such as New York City and Los Angeles have had immigrant neighborhoods for decades, in recent years similar neighborhoods have emerged in cities that had earlier lagged as immigrant destinations. A large predominantly Bangladeshi neighborhood known as Banglatown has emerged in Detroit, while in Dayton, Ohio, a refugee community of Ahiska Turks, an ethnically Turkish community originally from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, has moved to and revitalized the city’s Old North neighborhood. Almost every American city has similar stories.

The greatest number of immigrant neighborhoods in the United States, however, are Latinx neighborhoods. From northeastern mill towns such as Lawrence in Massachusetts, Passaic in New Jersey and Reading in Pennsylvania, all of which are now majority-Latinx cities, to large cities or rural areas, few regions in the United States lack a strong Latinx presence. Again, their diversity is staggering. Dominican immigrants in Lawrence, Cubans in Miami, Tejanos along the Mexican border, and Salvadorans in Los Angeles are members of distinct cultures, only tenuously linked by a common language.

Researchers who have studied the spatial effects of immigration have found them to be generally positive, especially for older urban neighborhoods suffering from depopulation and disinvestment. As sociologist Robert Sampson, who has studied the subject closely, writes, “the evidence merits including immigration alongside other more dominant hypotheses for the nation’s crime decline and its urban revitalization.”¹³ While Sampson cautions about drawing excessive generalizations, given the diversity of immigrant populations and their settings, he nonetheless finds strong relationships between immigration and crime declines, challenging current political rhetoric on the subject. At the same time, immigration has triggered localized conflicts, not only the highly publicized and often ideologically charged conflicts between the dominant non-Latinx white population and Latinx immigrants but also conflicts between Black and Latinx or other immigrant communities or between native Blacks and African or Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

Another issue is the staying power of immigrant neighborhoods. Just as the first wave of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant communities gradually dissolved as their residents or their descendants assimilated into larger ethnically mixed communities, the same may be taking place, often at an accelerated pace, in more recently formed immigrant enclaves. As we discussed in chapter 3, the transition of the first generation of immigrants was often a two-step process: from the initial enclave to a less crowded, more outlying but still immigrant-focused neighborhood usually still within the central city, followed a generation later by the conjoined processes of suburbanization and assimilation. That first step is already taking place for many immigrant communities more quickly than in previous generations. Some of Detroit’s Banglatown residents already see the neighborhood as a first-step community and aspire to earn enough money to move to the nearby inner-ring suburbs of Warren and Sterling Heights, where a Bangladeshi community is beginning to emerge.¹⁴

The suburbanization of Latinx communities in northern New Jersey, a major center of the nation’s Latinx population, is clearly visible in figures 7.5 and 7.6. As late as 2000, large Latinx population were largely limited to a few central cities, including Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, and Paterson. By 2018 the Latinx community had spread beyond the central cities into their suburban neighbors, forming a nearly contiguous belt of high Latinx population density from the small majority-Latinx city of Perth Amboy (immediately east of the area of Indian population density mentioned earlier) to the inner-ring suburbs of Bergen County, over thirty miles to the north.

Whatever the future may hold, immigration has transformed hundreds if not thousands of American neighborhoods. The effects of this transformation, which vary dramatically based on the characteristics of the immigrant community and those of the larger community in which they have settled, are only beginning to be well understood.

Economic Trauma and Transformation

The last sixty years in the United States have seen economic transformations as potent and unsettling as the nation’s demographic transformation. After nearly a hundred years during which America’s economy was driven by manufacturing and its manufacturing sector was driven by heavy industry, led by steelmaking and the automobile industry, that era came abruptly to an end during the 1970s. Symbolically, at least, the end of that era has a date: September 16, 1977, known to this day in Youngstown, Ohio, as “Black Monday,” the day when Youngstown Sheet & Tube shut down its Campbell Works. “Within the next 18 months,” Salena Zito writes, “US Steel announced that the nation’s largest steel producer was also shutting down 16 plants across the nation, including their Ohio Works in Youngstown, a move that eliminated an additional 4,000 workers in Youngstown.”¹⁵

The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States peaked in 1969 at nearly 20 million, or nearly 30 percent of the nation’s total nonagricultural workforce. While manufacturing is still an important part of the nation’s economy, it commands a much smaller share. By 2019, the remaining 12 million industrial jobs made up only slightly more than 8 percent of the nonagricultural workforce. Jobs in the flagship steel and automobile industries have dropped from nearly 2.2 million in the 1960s to roughly 750,000 today. Moreover, factory jobs are not what or where they once were. Manufacturing has all but disappeared in historic centers of industry such as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Factories are more likely to be found today in small cities or rural areas in the South and West and are far less likely to be unionized. Today only 1 out of 11 manufacturing workers in the United States are union members, compared to nearly half in the 1960s.¹⁶

During the decades following World War II, unionized factory jobs propelled millions into the middle class and into homeownership in either the central cities or their burgeoning inner suburbs. The relationship between declining union membership and increased income inequality is vividly depicted in figure 7.7. The loss of manufacturing jobs and the decline of industrial unions has had a devastating effect on many neighborhoods, particularly in industrial cities and even more so in smaller cities such as Youngstown or Flint, which have been unable to create a new export economy to replace their lost industrial base.

Innumerable neighborhoods in industrial cities were configured socially and economically around factory jobs, sustained by the wages that factory workers brought home. They were also, particularly in cities dominated by heavy industries such as steel and automobiles, organized socially around unions and workplaces. Industrial unions were not only a means by which workers improved wages and working conditions, but they were vehicles for social cohesion, for crafting individual and group identity, through such mundane things as picnics, clubs, and the role of the union hall as a neighborhood social center. Even in those few areas where unions, as economic organizations, still play an important role, the social function of the union has largely withered away. As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett write in their book The Upswing, “the solidarity of union halls is now at most a fading memory of aging men.”¹⁷

The growth of income inequality also meant that there were fewer and fewer middle-income households, a phenomenon aptly characterized as the “hollowing out of the middle class.” As sociologists Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have documented, this has been coupled with an increasing tendency of Americans to sort themselves by economic level, resulting in a decline in middle-income neighborhoods. Historically diverse by income and other social characteristics, the decline of middle-income neighborhoods has been even greater than the decline of middle-income households.¹⁸ This decline has been particularly pronounced in urban areas, where the national trends have been exacerbated by continued outward middle-class migration as well as in recent years the concentration of more affluent households in small upscale or gentrifying enclaves.

In 1970 over half of all of Philadelphia’s census tracts were middle income, meaning that their median income was between 80 percent and 120 percent of the citywide median. By 2018, the number had dropped to only slightly more than one-quarter. Conversely, in 1970 only 3 percent were either poor (under 50 percent of citywide median) or wealthy (over 200 percent); by 2018, that number had grown to nearly 20 percent.

The downward trajectory of the nation’s middle neighborhoods will be discussed in detail in chapter 12. While many factors are contributing to their difficulties, they begin with the change in the economic makeup of the nation’s households.

Sorting, Identity, and the Good Neighborhood

A major reason that people of diverse economic levels, occupations, and backgrounds could comfortably share neighborhoods fifty or sixty years ago was that in most other respects they were not that different. Social values, behaviors, and preferences varied little across the income spectrum. Moreover, whether or not one had a bachelor’s or higher degree, which aside from race has become the dominant socioeconomic divide in America today, made far less difference in one’s economic conditions, behaviors, and attitudes than it does today.

The wage premium for a four-year or higher college degree has grown steadily since the 1970s. Not only has the gap between individual earnings of college and high school graduates widened, but the income gap between households headed by a college graduate compared to those headed by a high school graduate has widened even more.¹⁹ Today, the income of the average household headed by a college graduate is double that headed by a high school graduate. A household headed by someone with a professional degree, which includes not only lawyers and those with MBAs but also city planners and social workers, has an income on the average more than three times that of the high school graduate’s household (figure 7.8). This disparity arises from three different factors that reinforce one another:

• The wages of college graduates have risen more quickly than those of people without a BA or higher degree, including those with an associate degree or some college;²⁰
• Men and women with college degrees are increasingly likely to marry one another rather than marry someone without a college degree, thus concentrating high earners within the same households; and
• Once married, households made up of people with college degrees are significantly more likely than those without degrees to remain married rather than divorce or separate.

All of these reflect fundamental shifts from the 1960s and 1970s. A recent study found that by age forty-six, nearly 60 percent of people without a high school diploma and nearly 50 percent of those with a high school diploma or some college who had married at least once had divorced, compared to only 30 percent of college graduates.²¹ Since married couples—with the potent economic benefits of having two wage earners as well as significant child-rearing benefits over single parents—are more likely to be made up of two college graduates, they thus pass on the economic benefits of a college education to future generations. Nationally, in 2018, 89 percent of all children born to women with college degrees were born into an intact marriage, compared to only 54 percent of children born to women without a college degree. In urban areas the disparity was even greater. As journalist Claire Cain Miller has written, “Marriage, which used to be the default way to form a family in the United States, regardless of income or education, has become yet another part of American life reserved for those who are most privileged.”²²

These disparities extend to other behavioral realms. Only 8 percent of college graduates are regular smokers, compared to 27 percent of people with only a high school diploma. Sixty percent of college graduates exercise enough to meet the official standards for aerobic activity, compared to 37 percent of high school graduates.²³ Harder to quantify but readily visible are different preferences in style, food, recreational activities, and more based on educational attainment.²⁴ Whereas sixty years ago both factory workers and college professors would go to the same white tablecloth restaurant to celebrate a family milestone or social occasion, today their choices would be starkly different.

Political polarization has also increased, often corresponding to and reinforcing barriers created by economic or social class disparities. In a 2015 Pew survey, 49 percent of respondents with a BA or higher degree took largely liberal positions on public issues, compared to 26 percent of those with a high school diploma or less.²⁵ Since the 1990s, according to another Pew study, “Partisan animosity has increased substantially.… In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies ‘are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being,’ ”²⁶ or as Putnam and Garrett pithily put it, “both Democrats and Republicans increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents.”²⁷

The partisan divide in the 2020 presidential election links both the educational and the racial divides, as the exit polls shown in figure 7.9 illustrate. Notably, the partisan gap between white and nonwhite (the data conflates Black, Latinx, and Asian) voters without college degrees is roughly double the racial gap for voters with college degrees. All these shifts are part of a larger picture with powerful implications for neighborhoods. In The Upswing, Putnam and Garrett present a mass of evidence to show how, after steady movement toward greater economic equality and communitarian values from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s and 1960s, those trends abruptly reversed as the nation turned from communitarian to individualistic values. As Putnam and Garrett put it, we went from a “we” society in the 1950s and 1960s to a measurably more “I” society today.²⁸

An individualistic society focuses on the self and on its “identity,” an idea that over the past fifty or so years has moved from a concept used in social psychology to perhaps the fundamental defining term of contemporary American society. Two prominent thinkers called attention to this shift in important books that appeared almost simultaneously at the end of the 1970s: Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism and Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man.²⁹ While coming from radically different disciplines and perspectives—Lasch was a part-Freudian, part-Marxist literary scholar, while Sennett was (and is) a less ideologically grounded social philosopher—they both identified the emerging preoccupation with the self as a threat to the forms of social engagement central to the communitarian ideal. Sennett focused on it directly, writing that “often against our own knowledge, we are caught up in a war between the demands of social existence and a belief that we develop as human beings only through contrary modes of intimate psychic existence.”³⁰ While he does not address neighborhoods as such, he focuses on the role of civility, which he defines as “the activity which protects people from each other and yet allows them to enjoy one another’s company,” very much a paraphrase of the idea underlying the value of weak ties for good neighborhoods that we introduced in chapter 1.³¹

Identity challenges the premises of communitarianism in two distinct ways: first, as a focus on the self to the exclusion of others, and second, by focusing on group identity.³² As Putnam and Garrett write, “the concept of ‘identity’ itself had begun to spread beyond developmental psychology to gender and racial identity in the 1970s and 1980s and to identity politics by the 1990s.”³³ Sennett put his finger on the danger of this spread, writing of

the perversion of fraternity in modern communal experience.… The narrower the scope of a community formed by collective personality, the more destructive does the experience of fraternal feeling become. Outsiders, unknowns, unlikes become creatures to be shunned; the personality traits the community shares become ever more exclusive; the very act of sharing becomes ever more centered upon decisions about who can belong and who cannot.³⁴

Reinforced by the way in which the internet and social media have come to function as echo chambers for the “perversion of fraternity,” the demands for ideological purity among insiders, the drawing of boundaries between insider and outsider, and the shunning or demonizing of those outside the boundaries have come to play an increasingly prominent role in contemporary American communal life.

At any level, a good neighborhood is fundamentally a communitarian project. The heyday of the white urban neighborhood and its emerging suburban counterparts was arguably the 1950s, the height of the “we” society. In many respects, American society has made important progress since then in terms of what “we” means. “We” today has brought LGBTQ people into mainstream America in ways that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s, has largely ended the paternalistic relegation of women to subordinate roles, and, although in far from adequate fashion, begun the process of incorporating America’s Black population into the national polity.

This is important, even essential. But it raises many questions, particularly when coupled with the simultaneous focus on identity and especially with respect to race. First, these changes appear to resonate most powerfully, on the one hand, in the intimate settings of personal relationships and, on the other, in national legal and institutional frameworks and far less in the intermediate space of the neighborhood. It is telling that the propensity of white home buyers purchasing a home in a predominantly Black neighborhood has actually declined over the past decade from what was already a very low level.³⁵ Second, to what extent is much of the broadening of the mainstream yet another elite project, another reflection of the gap in attitudes and values between the highly educated, affluent minority and the less educated and less affluent majority of America’s white population? This is a complex question, which we cannot answer in this book, yet the extent to which recent years have seen a reemergence of forums for openly racist discourse as well as the hardening of lines over a variety of social and cultural issues raises questions about the nature and extent of America’s social transformation. As Putnam and Garrett observe, pointing out how much more significant Black economic and educational progress was from the 1940s through the 1970s than since, “a selfish, fragmented ‘I’ society is not a favorable environment for achieving racial equality.”³⁶

Nor, we must recognize, is it a favorable environment for sustaining or rebuilding good neighborhoods. At the same time, the picture is not entirely bleak. Immigrants have revived many urban neighborhoods, while other neighborhoods have been reinvigorated through the efforts of their residents and community development corporations. Although not without fostering conflict, the youth movement to the cities has given downtowns and many nearby areas new life, even in a city such as Detroit that not long ago was grist for apocalyptic media fantasies. Under the media radar, numerous urban and suburban neighborhoods continue to provide decent, if not manicured or elegant, places for people to live good lives and for their children to grow into successful adults. As the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic brought home for many people, being part of a neighborhood and being able to connect with others within a bounded physical space—not the virtual space of Zoom and Instagram—still matter. The good neighborhood is challenged, but it is not a lost cause.