A century ago, upward mobility meant moving to the nice side of town. More specifically, it meant moving upwind of the smokestacks in the commercial district – generally west across a set of train tracks. But college reunion attendees no longer do that. We aren’t among the 25% of Americans that skew the mobility numbers by staying put. We move to multicultural urban neighborhoods real estate agents assign clumsy neologisms like “Sodomofo” or exclusive enclaves they just call “Town.” Often, we do it in that order. It’s almost as though we have no choice.
And, in a sense, we don’t. Because finding a place to live is not just about finding a place to live, but about finding a place to put money. Moving is not just about what moves us – natural wine bars, small class sizes – but what moves markets.
In 2008, The Onion ran an article with the headline “Nation's Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization.” The joke was rooted in the American understanding of gentrification as a process of racial displacement. After all, only the almost rich care about that kind of symbolic violence. But The Onion was reporting a real process – maybe even more real than gentrification itself, albeit it was doing so accidentally.
Gentrification is a strange subject because it’s constantly discussed in serious tones even though no one knows how it works or even if it’s real. There are plenty of studies suggesting it is not. The most notable of the bunch, conducted in Boston in 2002 by economist Jacob Vigdor, looked at neighborhood changes between 1974 and 1997 – anecdotally understood as a period of outrageous gentrification – and found no evidence supporting the idea that poor people left (or were “pushed out”) at a higher than normal rate. Subsequent studies have documented a bit more displacement – though rarely economic hardship – while also suggesting that gentrification is not one thing. The sleeve-tattooed creative directors who move to Black and Brown neighborhoods in search of room for their vinyl collections, Vitsoe shelving unit, and authenticity, behave absolutely nothing like the people that follow.
The sneakers-at-work folks are bucking a century-old trend. The loafers-at-dinner folks that mimic them are not.
Like many arguments, the shouting match over urban spaces was started by the “ethnic whites.” At the the end of the 19th century, a charcuterie plate of Catholic and Jewish Euro-mutts piled into American cities. Some 72% of immigrants huddling in their masses did so in urban areas. By 1900, 30 million people, or 30% of the total population, lived in booming cities. Then, southern Blacks ditched Jim Crow. They migrate north at an unprecedented rate – six million in less than a decade – and found themselves standing eye to eye with all those Seamuses, Rachels, and Vincenzos. A fight was inevitable.
The federal government’s contribution to this brawl: Giving Vincenzo a lead pipe.
Bankers’ maps of Brooklyn (and most other urban areas in the United States) dating back from the 1930s show majority Black areas stained a deep red. These “redlined” neighborhoods were deemed ineligible for low-interest mortgages from the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Affairs and denied affordable housing insurance. These predominantly Black communities – Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Side, Compton – were not just Black and poor. They were financially engineered to ensure the poverty of Black people unable to move into neighborhoods where racially restrictive covenants were written into property deeds or “sundown towns” with explicit and extralegal but strongly enforced “Whites Only After Dark” policies.
Housing segregation hit fast forward after WWII, when real estate agents and urban developers began blockbusting, selling apartments in largely white neighborhoods to Black families in order to scare white locals into panic selling at low prices. It wasn’t long before the “ethnic” whites fled to commuter towns, where they had easy access to financial instruments and housing stock made more valuable by its distance to any redlined neighborhoods. It didn’t take long for these new suburbanites to strategically forget where they came from.
“It is ridiculous to suppose that those of us in the suburbs have any responsibility to help in the current Philadelphia school crisis,” fumed a letter to the editor from a Philadelphia Inquirer in 1968. “We did not create the problems of the inner city and we are not obligated to help in their solution.”
This dumb, irresponsible stance became, more or less, the default position of American suburbanites. The cities were a war zone. The suburbs were a refuge. “Your home is a retreat…,” read a 1982 advertisement for Ethan Allen sofas, “where you can shut out the world and its traumas. It’s a haven your children can run to, not run away from.”
The irony: The Irish-American kids who grew up playing Super Nintendo on Ethan Allen couches ran away to the city – at least the smart ones did.
Between 2000 and 2010, only two downtowns in the top 100 American metropolitans grew faster than their suburbs. But, at the same time, more college-educated professionals between the ages of 25 and 34 moved into the city than the suburbs in 39 of the largest 50 cities in America. This represented a massive reversal and created an awkward vibe in the “up-and-coming” neighborhoods where creative professionals – newly invested in Air Force Ones – moved in next to the grandchildren of the very locals their grandparents had maligned (if not egged) over the years. Lots of talk about cultural equity ensued. Arrivistes went out of their way to shop at local bodegas and subsidize community gardens.
But that was just the first wave.
In 2003, urbanist Loretta Lees got obsessed with Brooklyn Heights, a pretty neighborhood on the promenade that once had a beautiful view of the Twin Towers. At the time, what she called “financifiers” were buying townhomes from the creative professional who’d bought them in the 1990s from Black locals who’d bought them in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s from Irish- and Italian-American commuters getting the fuck out of dodge. What she found was that the new whites didn’t behave like the old off-whites. Whereas creative class professionals supported local businesses and took an interest in the community as a whole, the financifiers took an interest solely in the creative professionals.
They wanted to have cool friends. Or, barring that, at least cool neighbors. Beyond that, they wanted to accumulate home equity the same way the off-whites had in their suburbs. The only real difference was a willingness to walk up one more flight of creaking townhouse stairs. In 2012, Brooklyn Heights got its first Starbucks. In 2016, a new condo with views of the Manhattan skyline sold for $6.5 million.
Whatever the effects of gentrification may or may not be, the effects of financification – aristocratization – are more extreme. Gentrifiers show up with good intentions. Financifiers show up with developers. Muffin shops spring up and dive bars start serving mezcal cocktails. That’s typically when the first wave of gentrifiers tries to make an Irish exit – often to the suburbs. But they don’t just leave. They take a pot of gold with them.
Rising home values do not, despite what NYU’s neo-marxist, anti-gentrification slacktivists may choose to believe, magically make anyone poorer. They make specific groups of people quite a lot wealthier. They provide Prospect Heights speculators the capital necessary to move to the suburbs and replay history in miniature.
Many of those “brain drain” college-grads who puddled in Sodomofo during the great recession, took advantage of the low interest rates on offer a decade later to move back to the suburbs as home prices surged. They bought their own Ethan Allen sofas (slipcovered so the dog was allowed “up”) and did what suburbanites do – as sociologist and up-state hipster Lewis Mumford put it in 1961: “withdraw like a monk and live like a prince.”
Like most royalty, they worried about the peasants. Financially speaking, they needed a crocodile-filled moat, a trebuchet, or cache of longbows to keep the plebes at bay. They found one.
In 2020, a bunch of Erewhon regulars formed “Advocates for Malibu Public Schools," which advocated for Malibu’s secession from the Santa Monica school district. The conflict strained relations between moms schlepping to baby yoga studio sessions in Venice, but didn’t get much play outside LA because the median listing price in Santa Monica is $1.8 million and the median listing price in Malibu is roughly $2.6 million. Americans are quick to dismiss the quibbles of the rich even when something relatively new and alarming is going on.
Between 1910 and 1970, the number of school districts in America dropped roughly 90% – from 200,000 to 20,0000. As educators reacted to constricted budgets by leveraging economies of scale, school districts expanded osmotically, but when the market crashed in 2008, property taxes and mortgages went unpaid, construction all but stopped, and budgets in less financially resilient areas got boa-ed faster than a tapir with a limp. Education funding in most states did not recover to pre-crisis levels for almost a decade.
Roughly 45% of every American public school’s budget is levied from local property taxes. Seceding districts see a fiscal advantage compared to general districts of $3,000 per pupil, with $2,312 of that difference accounted for by reallocation of local property tax revenue. Between 2004 and 2008, 16 communities – mostly wealthier and uniformly whiter – attempted to secede from their school districts. Between 2009 and 2015, 42 followed suit. Some of those secessions (Birmingham, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge) effectively re-segregated southern schools, but most split Volvo XC90 communities from Porsche Cayenne communities. Secession attempts were twice as likely to happen in suburban communities than urban ones.
For the last few years, Maine, which is about as diverse as a Dropkick Murphys concert, has been at the forefront of this emerging trend and the average cost of private school tuition (for day students) has shot up 35% from $36,500 to $49,300.
Access to public schools in small, wealthy communities – many of them functionally more private than private institutions with scholarship programs – ensures homeowners a strong return on investment. Well-to-do parents (no small number of them financifiers) will pay up to give little Spencer the best possible shot of getting into UVA. The more expensive, less charitable suburbs became the absolute best ass-covering bet.
Also, they are very nice places to live.
