The Chasm Among American Cities Is Growing Ever Wider
A vacant Denny's on Main Street in Dayton, Ohio. (Vistavision / Flickr)
The news this past year has been full of the tribulations facing the cities
at the vanguard of the great urban rebirth. There are fights over Uber
limits in New York, cash-free purchasing in Washington, D.C., and extreme
housing costs in San Francisco.
Dayton, Ohio, has been grappling with a different set of concerns. For
example, there was a spate of disturbing, unexplained deaths in a formerly
middle-class neighborhood just northwest of downtown. Over the span of seven
months, five womens bodies were found scattered around the area, at least
three of them the victims of homicides, the others likely dead by overdose.
Three had gone undiscovered for so long that theyd been partly eaten by
animals. The deaths, and their aftermath, seemed to capture three of the
citys pathologies violence, drug abuse and abandonment inside an area
of little more than a few square blocks
The plight of small and mid-sized post-industrial cities like Dayton is
hardly new, but its gotten obscured in recent years. The 2016 election drew
a lot of attention to the urban-rural divide between vibrant blue islands
and fading red expanses that turned out so strongly for Donald Trump. What
all the talk of the urban-rural gap overlooks is the growing divide among
cities, too.
There have always been more and less wealthy cities, but nothing like what
is on display today, as a select group of hyper-prosperous cities put
ever-greater distance between themselves and their counterparts. Consider
this. In 1980, even after the first wave of deindustrialization, Middle
American cities such as Dayton were remarkably close to par with their
coastal peers. Per capita income in the Seattle area was only 16 percent
greater than in the Dayton area. In metro Boston, the edge was only 6
percent. In New York, 14 percent. In Washington, 31 percent. And in the San
Francisco Bay Area, 33 percent.
All those cities have since left Dayton in the dust. Seattles per capita
income is now 48 percent greater. Bostons edge has jumped all the way to 61
percent a tenfold increase. New York and Washington are both over 50
percent greater. And in the Bay Area, per capita income is 94 percent
greater than in the Dayton areathat is, almost double. (And these stats are
for the whole Dayton area, not just the diminished city proper, which has
lost nearly half its population since 1960, to about 140,000 today, and
where more than a third of the population now lives in poverty.) Youll find
similarly widening gaps if you substitute Dayton with St. Louis or Milwaukee
or Fresno or Buffalo.
You hardly need income data, though, to discern these divides. Just use your
own eyes. Take, for instance, the increasingly stark contrast between
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, where I live. A few decades ago, the cities
were strikingly similar in their scale, levels of wealth and urban
challenges in fact, Baltimores population was 150,000 larger than D.C.s
as recently as 1980.
Today, to travel the 40 miles between the two cities is to risk vertigo, so
wildly disparate have they become in cost of living, income levels and
growth trajectory. Baltimore is laboring to demolish thousands of late-19th
century townhouses that would each fetch close to seven figures in many
parts of D.C. Last year, a single Realtor in D.C. sold five homes for more
than $3.7 million each, more than any home sold in Baltimore that year.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan in 2015 approved an expansion of the Washington
Metro while killing a new rail line for Baltimores paltry transit system,
furthering the divide.
You might expect regional inequality to self-correct, given how costly and
congested the hyper-prosperous cities have become. Instead, the success of
these cities feeds on itself, as more employers and highly educated people
decide they need to be where the action is. Its a winner-take-all,
rich-get-richer effect. The result is less than ideal for everyone: Those in
the winner-take-all cities struggle to get by even with a decent salary,
while those in the left-behind cities face demoralizing blight and struggle
to find fulfilling work.
This is the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen in the digital
age. The internet was supposed to free us to live anywhere. But as Berkeley
economist Enrico Moretti foresaw in his 2011 book, The New Geography of
Jobs, the tech economy in fact encourages agglomeration: Innovation happens
best in close proximity, not to mention that its easier to make your
venture-capital pitch face to face. It is almost as if, starting in the
1980s, the American economy bifurcated, Moretti wrote. On one side, cities
with little human capital and traditional economies started experiencing
diminishing returns and stiff competition from abroad. On the other, cities
rich in human capital and economies based on knowledge-intensive sectors
started seeing increasing returns and took full advantage of globalized
markets.
The irony for Dayton is that it knows the value of innovation clusters as
well as anywhere. In the early decades of the last century, the city was
home not only to the Wright brothers, but to lesser known inventors like
Charles Kettering, who is credited with the electrical starting motor, among
many automotive advances. The difference in the industrial age was that the
manufacturing that flowed from those advances could be done just about
anywhere with manpower, raw materials and transportation access. Today,
manufacturing is typically done overseas, while the wealth accumulates in
the hub cities where the intellectual property originated.
Economic concentration also plays a role in how the tech economy fuels
regional inequality. As certain industries become dominated by certain
companies think of Google and Facebooks growing share of ad revenue, or
Amazons growing share of retail it follows that more and more wealth
flows to the places where those companies are based: the Bay Area and
Seattle.
Social factors play a role, too. Since workers are less likely to spend
their careers with one employer, theyre more likely to seek out a city
where they can easily find a new job in their field if one doesnt work out.
Youre more likely to take a biotech job in Boston than that one intriguing
option in Rochester. The rise of the two-income professional couple
exacerbates this; you understandably want to be somewhere where both of you
can find good jobs. Then theres the growing tendency of well-off people to
live amongst themselves, rather than in more mixed-income places, which
increasingly concentrates them not only in certain neighborhoods, but
certain metro areas. Call it the Brookline or Bethesda effect: seeking
security in the comfort of excellent schools full of the children of fellow
highly educated achievers.
The regional inequality is most glaring when it comes to the
hyper-prosperous coastal enclaves, but it plays out within the interior, as
well. Optimists about Middle America like to point to a handful of
non-coastal cities that are thriving, without noting the many nearby cities
being left behind. You hear a lot about Nashville, but less about Memphis; a
lot about Columbus, but less about Akron and Toledo. As a recent report by
the Greater Ohio Policy Center found, Columbus, which was from its founding
less reliant on manufacturing than other Ohio cities, has in recent years
diverged dramatically from other cities in the state on a whole range of
economic measures, including population growth, poverty rates, labor force
participation, and median income. More often than not, these regional
winners are home to state capitals and major public universities: talented
students head there for college, and dont come back.
Too often, talk about left-behind regions is met by eye-rolling from
cosmopolitans who view it as yet another attempt to summon sympathy for
woebegone Trump voters. But this betrays a misreading of who lives in these
struggling cities. Yes, theyre home to white working-class Obama-Trump
voters. Theyre also each home to tens of thousands of African-Americans,
many of whom voted for Hillary Clinton, and many others of whom stayed home,
seeing nothing on offer to address their plight. (Dayton proper is 40
percent black.) It was the combination of these voting blocs that explained
Clintons losses in Midwestern statesnot just voters turning to Trump, but
Democrats in Milwaukee and Detroit and Cleveland who stayed home or voted
third party.
Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton, joked darkly in a recent interview with me
about how it took the 2016 election to draw notice to the plight of Middle
America. I mean, like look, I think the coastals need to pay attention to
this because we can destroy elections, she said. You know, thats what we
can do, and I mean, then we get your attention. Regardless of the cause,
the growing regional disparities are starting to get overdue scrutiny from
at least some in the upper echelons. Earlier this year, Larry Summers, the
former treasury secretary, co-authored a big paper with Harvard colleagues
Benjamin Austin and Edward Glaeser titled Saving the Heartland, which
makes the case for place-based policies such as increasing wage subsidies
like the Earned Income Tax Credit in struggling areas. The problem has also
attracted AOL co-founder Steve Case, who, with Hillbilly Elegy author J.D.
Vance, has been trying to draw more venture capital to Middle America.
For now, though, these cities are forging ahead on their own. For Dayton,
that has meant, among other things, trying to make itself welcoming to
immigrants and refugees. This effort has succeeded in one regard: The city
has drawn hundreds of Ahiska Turks, an ethnic Turkish minority who were
persecuted in Russia and former Soviet republics and briefly granted refugee
status last decade. The Ahiska Turks have prospered in the trucking industry
their luxury cars are a familiar sight around Dayton and they have
renovated countless formerly vacant homes on the north side. As Islom
Shakhbandarov, a community leader who co-owns a trucking company called
American Power, put it to me with a knowing smile as he sat behind his big
executive desk: I see the opportunity, because it was almost empty and
there was room to fill it. But this solution only goes so far for
struggling cities at a time when the Trump administration is sharply
curtailing refugee admissions, especially when it comes to Muslim refugees
such as the Ahiska Turks.
Cities like Dayton are also embracing job growth of a sort that not so long
ago would have been considered beneath them. The vast GM plant just south of
the city that shut down in 2008 is now home to a Chinese-owned auto glass
company called Fuyao. It employs more than 2,000, which helps explain why
the unemployment rate in the Dayton area is back to pre-recession levels.
But Fuyao pays much less than GM did. Wages start at about $15, and the work
is grueling; an employee was crushed to death in March.
When I asked Cho Tak Wong, the billionaire founder and CEO of Fuyao, about
the wages, he objected to the premise of my question. The proper comparison,
he said, was not to what people used to make in Dayton, but to wages in
Mexico and China, by which yardstick Fuyaos pay in Dayton looked okay. Old
GM workers are very thankful towards us, because they lost their jobs after
the closure, he said. They are very happy since we came and offered them
jobs.
In fact, happiness is an emotion on scant display in Dayton these days. The
city has been one of the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic: nearly 400
people died of fatal overdoses in Montgomery County, which includes Dayton,
in just the first half of last year, eclipsing the countys total for the
entire year prior. Montgomery County Coroner Kent Harshbarger has deployed
refrigerator truck back-ups usually reserved for mass fatality events. The
overdose rate abated slightly over the second half of the year, as the
fentanyl strains in the local heroin supply weakened. That drop-off sadly
did not happen in Baltimore, which ended 2017 with a stunning tally of 761
fatal overdoses.
For all the talk about the opioid epidemic leaving few places untouched, the
fact is that its hit far harder in struggling cities than in
winner-take-all ones. And once the struggling cities become known as
thriving markets for illegal opiates, they draw ever more addicts from
nearby towns and suburbs, who avail themselves both of the drug supply and
of local social services: shelters, soup kitchens, and drug treatment
programs that arent available in the communities from which theyve come.
Its a dark inversion of the winner-take-all dynamic in prosperous cities:
instead of drawing ever more wealthy professionals, the struggling cities
draw ever more people in desperate straits.
Judging by the opioid epidemic stats alone, these cities come across as
awfully bleak. Nonetheless, Ive developed a strong fondness for themnot
just a fondness, but a preference for them over the winner-take-all cities.
They are vastly more affordable, making possible a more expansive, less
stressed existence; they are places where, thanks to their high need and
smaller scale, one committed person or family can make a real difference.
And they offer countless offbeat discoveries of the sort one is less likely
to find in glossier environs. One evening in Dayton at the end of a day
when I observed a harrowing autopsy at the coroners office of a 45-year-old
woman who had suffered a drug overdose I stumbled upon a chess club inside
an abandoned retail building downtown with a beautiful terra-cotta façade.
There, I played a couple close games against a local community college
student, and then wound up having dinner in a friendly tavern that turns out
to be one of just two cooperatively owned brewpubs in the country.
Naturally, I bought a share.
But the fates of these cities cant depend on just the predilections of this
or that new arrival with a soft spot for the underdog. The country must
decide what its willing to do to narrow the regional gaps, from tackling
economic concentration to targeting public investment. For some time,
theres been a growing awareness of the problem in having so much wealth
concentrated in such a narrow slice of the income ladder. Its now worth
also considering what it means to have so much wealth concentrated in a
narrow slice of cities.
Alec MacGillis / ProPublica
