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> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happen

> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I am a staunch opponent of racism (as if anyone would say otherwise) but I don't think that the answer is that simple. White flight is only part of it. The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute). I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Maybe as a non-americas I should stay out of this. But.. Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences). This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved. I don’t understand this conversation at all.
  - marindez 9y ago
    >If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes? Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture. There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of. It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.
      - saint_fiasco 9y ago
        The suburb won't go away but we don't care about the suburb anyway. The most important thing is the people in them. Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.
        d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
        Which government? The city government is broke. If they merge, the larger city could pay for transitioning costs, but that would be a massive cost (worth it, possibly!) and politically difficult.
        saint_fiasco 9y ago
        I don't think it would be fair if the city paid for it. The direct cost would go to them and the direct benefit to others. In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.
- paganel 9y ago
  > Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute The same thing (i.e. the creation of suburbs) is now happening in Eastern Europe, at least it's happening in the country from where I'm from (Romania) without racism playing that much of a part in it. Yeah, some of the middle-class people who chose to move to the suburbs mentioned as motives "wanting to get away from the gipsies", but most of said middle-class people used to live in communist apartment-blocks where there were almost no gipsies (the latter mostly inhabit the oldish houses from the downtown area, formerly owned by the local Jewish community). The main reason for people moving out to the suburbs are those that you underlined: it has now become economically feasible for many families to own 2 cars and to buy a piece of land and to build a house on it. That's it. It's nevertheless pretty interesting seeing us repeating the same urbanism mistakes that the US did in the 1950s-1960s and the Western European countries started doing from the 1970s. We're now at the phase where we like to invest money into building road-bridges over everything, in order to reduce commute times, as the saying goes. There are very few people (myself included) who still say that this is not the good way going forward and that we should learn from others' mistakes, but we're seen as either nostalgics ("why we would still invest in obsolete things like tramways? tramways are communist!") or as "know-nothings".
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    I am from those parts as well and saw how some of the upper middle class people, have started to move to new housing developments around the city. Which is funny, because back in the day those suburbs previously were not desirable and it's were factories and cheaper and older apartments were located. And it's true that at least there it has nothing to do with racism, it comes I wanting a bigger house, a yard, a fence, a safe place for kids to play in and so on. Now, sure those things have been there in the country-side in the villages, but unfortunately the jobs are all in the city center. Some villages less than an hour drive from the city have seen new development, but beyond that it is the suburbs - the American Dream right in the heart of Eastern Europe. The downside is that now the roads are swamped in cars. Unlike some American cities, those cities were not designed to have that many cars so there is no place to park them, they are driven and parked on sidewalks, they clog streets and public transport can't move during rush hour. But what to do, they have more money, they can buy cars, there is land around the city. Maybe tax cars more, add a luxury property tax? The thing is the people who live in those suburbs are also the one running everything (either through corruption or just simple economic power).
- spamizbad 9y ago
  > The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. It's more complicated than that. First, there's the history of red-lining[1], and no requirement that housing be "integrated" (which meant non-discriminatory back then), so you had people like Levitt only allow whites to buy home. Second, the government financed most of the critical infrastructure necessary to "bootstrap" beyond just highway and roads. So if your water, sewer, electric, and school infrastructure was all built wholly or partially funded via federal or state grants or "pork", you could keep your taxes low because you have lots of shiny-new infrastructure that's cheap to maintain that you didn't need to finance yourself through municipal bonds. This allowed your tax money to be poured directly into hiring the best teachers, building parks, etc. Getting all that infrastructure for free greatly masked the inefficiencies of the suburbs and why, today at least, suburbs often carry huge property taxes burdens or offer very limited services (like not even curbs or sidewalks) and rely on a county/township to cover the essentials. The Suburbs are basically a public housing project for the middle class. If you actually required the average American to pay for their suburb with little or no help from the federal government it never would have gotten off the ground. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
- akgerber 9y ago
  Land in the suburbs was also specifically cheaper to white veterans in the postwar era (when early auto-oriented suburbs were built) because subsidized GI Bill mortgages were essentially exclusive to whites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...
0x4f3759df 9y ago
Also Blockbusting and the policy of destroying ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by running a couple of highways through them.
Spooky23 9y ago
White flight wasn’t just hysteria or racism at the individual level. It was driven by federal policy back in the New Deal era. In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.
baldfat 9y ago
White Flight hit Allentown, PA very late. It wasn't till a new Interstate was finished I-78 and it was the mid to late 1980s. I live in Center City Allentown and it has now gotten over $1,000,000,000 in investment but the racism from the suburbs talking about how the city isn't what it was is infuriating. Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.
- Buttes 9y ago
  You weren't kidding about those comments. First story I clicked on: >Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.
- ForRealsies 9y ago
  While it's fun to get emotional, I'm more interested in statistics. Has crime increased in Allentown since the 80s?
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Actually the crime rate is fairly low for a city our size and the crime rate has had a consistent drop for the past 10 years. There are people who refuse to drive through Allentown due to fear of being a victim. http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015/02/how_safe_are_pennsylvania_citi.html http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Comments on almost every website I have visited that are not moderated are a toxic stew of conservative trolls. It would be one thing if it was breitbart or infowars or r/the_donald, but when we are talking about newspapers for the bluest urban areas, there's something else going on where the actual residents can't or wont participate in the online discourse in this manner because we know the majority of voters in those areas don't think like the online trolls.
lr4444lr 9y ago
undrivable That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.
simonsarris 9y ago
> Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed. Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration. It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason. If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no? [1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
- deong 9y ago
  I think that's conflating different forms of racism. There's no denying that the modern suburbs was in very large part a racist development. That doesn't mean anyone who took part in that development had racist intents. As you say, it's a perfectly logical decision to move one's family to the suburbs. That doesn't contradict the fact that the opportunity for you to do so was the product of racism, even if it was someone else's racism. The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  I have spoken directly with a few people who left their southern in town neighborhood (still houses with yards etc) in the early 70's because they did not like the way black people behaved after civil rights in the 60's. Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.
graeme 9y ago
We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause. We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east. We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas. I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases? My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits. Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north. But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise. Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35. What are the age demographics of Canada?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.
  - kashprime 9y ago
    Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ComputerGuru 9y ago

I am a staunch opponent of racism (as if anyone would say otherwise) but I don't think that the answer is that simple. White flight is only part of it. The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute). I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.

dalbasal 9y ago
Maybe as a non-americas I should stay out of this. But.. Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences). This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved. I don’t understand this conversation at all.
- marindez 9y ago
  >If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes? Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture. There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of. It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.
    - saint_fiasco 9y ago
      The suburb won't go away but we don't care about the suburb anyway. The most important thing is the people in them. Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.
      - d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
        Which government? The city government is broke. If they merge, the larger city could pay for transitioning costs, but that would be a massive cost (worth it, possibly!) and politically difficult.
        saint_fiasco 9y ago
        I don't think it would be fair if the city paid for it. The direct cost would go to them and the direct benefit to others. In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.
paganel 9y ago
> Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute The same thing (i.e. the creation of suburbs) is now happening in Eastern Europe, at least it's happening in the country from where I'm from (Romania) without racism playing that much of a part in it. Yeah, some of the middle-class people who chose to move to the suburbs mentioned as motives "wanting to get away from the gipsies", but most of said middle-class people used to live in communist apartment-blocks where there were almost no gipsies (the latter mostly inhabit the oldish houses from the downtown area, formerly owned by the local Jewish community). The main reason for people moving out to the suburbs are those that you underlined: it has now become economically feasible for many families to own 2 cars and to buy a piece of land and to build a house on it. That's it. It's nevertheless pretty interesting seeing us repeating the same urbanism mistakes that the US did in the 1950s-1960s and the Western European countries started doing from the 1970s. We're now at the phase where we like to invest money into building road-bridges over everything, in order to reduce commute times, as the saying goes. There are very few people (myself included) who still say that this is not the good way going forward and that we should learn from others' mistakes, but we're seen as either nostalgics ("why we would still invest in obsolete things like tramways? tramways are communist!") or as "know-nothings".
- rdtsc 9y ago
  I am from those parts as well and saw how some of the upper middle class people, have started to move to new housing developments around the city. Which is funny, because back in the day those suburbs previously were not desirable and it's were factories and cheaper and older apartments were located. And it's true that at least there it has nothing to do with racism, it comes I wanting a bigger house, a yard, a fence, a safe place for kids to play in and so on. Now, sure those things have been there in the country-side in the villages, but unfortunately the jobs are all in the city center. Some villages less than an hour drive from the city have seen new development, but beyond that it is the suburbs - the American Dream right in the heart of Eastern Europe. The downside is that now the roads are swamped in cars. Unlike some American cities, those cities were not designed to have that many cars so there is no place to park them, they are driven and parked on sidewalks, they clog streets and public transport can't move during rush hour. But what to do, they have more money, they can buy cars, there is land around the city. Maybe tax cars more, add a luxury property tax? The thing is the people who live in those suburbs are also the one running everything (either through corruption or just simple economic power).
spamizbad 9y ago
> The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. It's more complicated than that. First, there's the history of red-lining[1], and no requirement that housing be "integrated" (which meant non-discriminatory back then), so you had people like Levitt only allow whites to buy home. Second, the government financed most of the critical infrastructure necessary to "bootstrap" beyond just highway and roads. So if your water, sewer, electric, and school infrastructure was all built wholly or partially funded via federal or state grants or "pork", you could keep your taxes low because you have lots of shiny-new infrastructure that's cheap to maintain that you didn't need to finance yourself through municipal bonds. This allowed your tax money to be poured directly into hiring the best teachers, building parks, etc. Getting all that infrastructure for free greatly masked the inefficiencies of the suburbs and why, today at least, suburbs often carry huge property taxes burdens or offer very limited services (like not even curbs or sidewalks) and rely on a county/township to cover the essentials. The Suburbs are basically a public housing project for the middle class. If you actually required the average American to pay for their suburb with little or no help from the federal government it never would have gotten off the ground. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
akgerber 9y ago
Land in the suburbs was also specifically cheaper to white veterans in the postwar era (when early auto-oriented suburbs were built) because subsidized GI Bill mortgages were essentially exclusive to whites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...

0x4f3759df 9y ago

Also Blockbusting and the policy of destroying ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by running a couple of highways through them.

Spooky23 9y ago

White flight wasn’t just hysteria or racism at the individual level. It was driven by federal policy back in the New Deal era. In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.

baldfat 9y ago

White Flight hit Allentown, PA very late. It wasn't till a new Interstate was finished I-78 and it was the mid to late 1980s. I live in Center City Allentown and it has now gotten over $1,000,000,000 in investment but the racism from the suburbs talking about how the city isn't what it was is infuriating. Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.

Buttes 9y ago
You weren't kidding about those comments. First story I clicked on: >Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.
ForRealsies 9y ago
While it's fun to get emotional, I'm more interested in statistics. Has crime increased in Allentown since the 80s?
- baldfat 9y ago
  Actually the crime rate is fairly low for a city our size and the crime rate has had a consistent drop for the past 10 years. There are people who refuse to drive through Allentown due to fear of being a victim. http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015/02/how_safe_are_pennsylvania_citi.html http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...
stevenwoo 9y ago
Comments on almost every website I have visited that are not moderated are a toxic stew of conservative trolls. It would be one thing if it was breitbart or infowars or r/the_donald, but when we are talking about newspapers for the bluest urban areas, there's something else going on where the actual residents can't or wont participate in the online discourse in this manner because we know the majority of voters in those areas don't think like the online trolls.

lr4444lr 9y ago

undrivable That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.

simonsarris 9y ago

> Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed. Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration. It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason. If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no? [1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

deong 9y ago
I think that's conflating different forms of racism. There's no denying that the modern suburbs was in very large part a racist development. That doesn't mean anyone who took part in that development had racist intents. As you say, it's a perfectly logical decision to move one's family to the suburbs. That doesn't contradict the fact that the opportunity for you to do so was the product of racism, even if it was someone else's racism. The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
liveoneggs 9y ago
I have spoken directly with a few people who left their southern in town neighborhood (still houses with yards etc) in the early 70's because they did not like the way black people behaved after civil rights in the 60's. Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.

graeme 9y ago

We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause. We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east. We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas. I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases? My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits. Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north. But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.

lazerpants 9y ago
There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise. Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35. What are the age demographics of Canada?
- ghaff 9y ago
  And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.
- kashprime 9y ago
  Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.