I just returned from St.
Paul. In the early 1970s, as part of the War on Poverty, I lived and worked in
a St. Paul neighborhood called West Seventh. On this and in previous visits I
observe a drastically changed West Seventh. Its anchor, the Xcel Energy Center,
opened in September 2000 as the home of the Minnesota Wild. (Lady Gaga
performed there just after I left. Too bad she missed me.) There are two
hotels, one just opened. Several restaurants and bars line West Seventh,
including a brand new brew house. Several medical facilities are there. A short
walk down a hill leads to a string of condos on the east bank of the
Mississippi River.
As I walked
around West Seventh and around a couple other St. Paul neighborhoods, I thought
about Richard Florida, who caused a stir with his Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books [2002]; www.creativeclass.com). A city can recover from its post-industrial slump, Florida says, if it
can attract and retain a sufficient number of educated young adults. The way to
do so includes universities, trendy neighborhoods, an art scene, sports venues,
public transportation, medical and research facilities, skilled jobs and more.
Florida uses charts, a global creativity index and examples, including (on the
positive front) Austin, Seattle, Boston and more. He implies that any place has
the potential to thrive. Thus for a time his book and his talks were popular
with regional meetings of mayors, at business conferences, among urban planners
and professional associations and even some church organizations.
Now,
however, Florida realizes that his prescription has a downside. Yes, “the
concentration of talent and economic activity” makes a place thrive, he writes
in The New Urban Crisis (Basic Books,
2017). But… think about it logically… those places might perhaps be any
place, but cannot be all places. In fact, says Florida (again with
demographics, charts and several lists of “star cities”), a concentrated
thriving place causes inequality and eventually undermines the wider society,
including the trendy place itself. Whereas 15 years ago Florida celebrated one
side of the story, he now concentrates on the downside.
Housing
issues are a big symptom of the downside—including wide disparity in real
estate prices, lack of affordable housing, differences in municipal services
and persistent discrimination. A thriving part of town, Florida convincingly
shows, is not merely adjacent to another part of town. Concentrated urban
prosperity contributes to “chronic, concentrated urban poverty…which remains
the most troubling issue facing our cities.”
A handful
of new books wail against gentrification. (These books will be considered in a
subsequent blog.) Florida, who once was an unabashed proponent of
gentrification, admits the obvious: Gentrification displaces the elderly and
poor; it pushes them into neighborhoods that already have too much poverty. But
“direct displacement of people by gentrification is not as big an issue as it
is made out to be,” Florida explains. It is only a part of the inequality
problem which unfortunately “is driven by the same economic motor that powers
growth.”
Some
illnesses cannot be tackled wholesale and head on. A change in behavior,
however, gets at the illness indirectly. That is, treat the symptom to attack
the bigger cause. Within that framework an affordable housing effort undertaken
by the community organization in my own Chicago neighborhood, Southwest
Organizing (www.swopchicago.org), might be the solution to global inequality. SWOP’s rehab of vacant
structures will, of course, assist those families who move into the apartments.
With some interplay among other advocacy groups and interested developers, this
neighborhood project could be replicated and thereby somewhat offset the
downside of the trendy growth that occurs in other Chicago neighborhoods and
with more pinball effect the project could have some global implications.
Moralizing
is not productive. A revitalized neighborhood is hardly in itself a bad thing. The
best future for West Seventh, for all of St. Paul, for my neighborhood and for all
of Chicago requires intense interaction among many imperfect institutions—each
calling the others back to their original good purpose and each contributing to
thick relationships that minimize each institution’s occasional miscues and
shortsighted behavior.
To be
continued with more housing examples…
Droel edits a printed
newsletter on faith and work for National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102,
Chicago, IL 60629)
